Top 100 Quotes About Church And State
#1. But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.
Thomas Jefferson
#2. I believe this notion of separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel's imagination.
W. A. Criswell
#3. It is not classified as a pagan religion. The so-called New Age activities and this are not called religions and therefore don't come under the prohibition of mingling church and state that we have in this country.
Dixie Lee Ray
#4. I strongly believe in the separation of church and state. But freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion, there is a better way.
Al Gore
#5. The separation of "church and state" of which America is so proud was established in Islam fourteen centuries ago, when it was decided that no Caliph would have religious authority over the community.
Reza Aslan
#6. When cerebral processes enter into sports, you start screwing up. It's like the Constitution, which says separate church and state. You have to separate mind and body.
Bill Lee
#7. I agree with the idea that there is a separation of church and state. That teachers should not be leading prayer - a particular kind of prayer in classrooms.
Ken Buck
#8. The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803]
James Madison
#9. I think there is a puritanical wind that is blowing. I have never seen such a lack of separation between church and state in America, I don't believe in God, but if I did I would say that sex is a Godgiven right. Otherwise it's the end of our species.
Kevin Bacon
#10. There should be absolutely no 'Separation of Church and State' in America.
David Barton
#11. Whatever one's religion in his private life may be, for the officeholder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts - including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state.
John F. Kennedy
#12. If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
Felix Frankfurter
#13. No union exists between church and state, and perfect freedom of opinion is guaranteed to all sects and creeds.
James K. Polk
#14. I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.
Rick Santorum
#15. I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
George Carlin
#16. Turning, then, from this loathsome combination of church and state, and weeping over the follies of our fellow men, who yield themselves the willing dupes and drudges of these mountebanks, I consider reformation and redress as desperate, and abandon them to the Quixotism of more enthusiastic minds.
Thomas Jefferson
#17. The coziness between church and state is good for the state and bad for the church
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#18. I think very few people realize how much the separation of church and state has to do with the fact that Americans are not only more religious than a lot of other people in the world but that conversions are much more common here.
Susan Jacoby
#19. Some people have a fear of rejecting all the security that comes with family, church and state. They become fundamentalists.
Harold Ramis
#20. Church and State are both rent, by the tugging of the demonic and the Divine
Martin Luther
#21. Religion in the form of polytheism entered the world as the vindication of power. Not only was there no separation of church and state; religion was the transcendental justification of the state.
Jonathan Sacks
#22. When church and state are separate, the effects are happy, and they do not at all interfere with each other: but where they have been confounded together, no tongue nor pen can fully describe the mischiefs that have ensued.
Isaac Backus
#23. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all - I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.
Henry David Thoreau
#24. Separation of the Church and State is like a railroad track. It cannot be close to one another, neither can it be distant, because there will be derailment. We (Church) should cooperate with the government and the government should cooperate with us because we're serving the same people.
Jaime Sin
#25. Quite often you hear people say, 'What about separation of church and state?' There is no such thing.
Dan Severson
#27. Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society.
Samuel P. Huntington
#28. The real reason people oppose marriage equality is religious in nature. Marriage equality is therefore not only a civil rights issue, but also a separation-of-church-and-state issue.
David Silverman
#29. The current version of ... separation of church and state says you can be salt, and you can be light, but only inside the four walls of the church.
David Barton
#30. The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.
Georges Bataille
#31. The separation of church and state is extremely important to any of us who hold to the original traditions of our nation. To change these traditions by changing our traditional attitude toward public education would be harmful, I think, to our whole attitude of tolerance in the religious area.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#32. It doesn't say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state.
Sean Hannity
#33. For me, it's church and state, not church in state, and I really feel there are some churches in central Ohio crossing that line.
Eric Williams
#34. What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
Gunter Grass
#35. When Pat Robertson says there is no constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state, I say he is wrong.
Arlen Specter
#36. Both church and state claiming to be of divine origin have assumed divine right of man over woman; while church and state have thought for man, man has assumed the right to think for woman.
Matilda Joslyn Gage
#37. Leave the matter of religion to the family altar the church and the private school supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.
Ulysses S. Grant
#38. We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God? Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#39. There's a way to accomplish the separation of church and state, and at the same time, accomplish the social objective of having America become a hopeful place, and a loving place.
George W. Bush
#40. The first amendment makes it clear that we are free to practice religion without government interference. The Constitution also establishes the separation of church and state so that the laws we live by our never guided by religious zeal.
Roxane Gay
#41. Where Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.
James Russell Lowell
#42. I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office - and by personal conviction - I am sworn to uphold that tradition.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#43. Two orders of mankind are the enemies of church and state; the king without clemency, and the holy man without learning.
Saadi
#44. One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.
Karen Armstrong
#45. I have never met a happy atheist. I believe in separation of church and state, but I think we have gone so far over in the other direction of separating church and state.
Dixie Carter
#46. The fact that religion plays such a part in how people vote troubles me, troubles me as a minister's daughter. Because I always felt that the separation of church and state was what our forefathers and foremothers really fought for.
Tori Amos
#47. Some remote fragment of Main Line to somewhere else, there was, which was going to ruin the Money Market if it failed, and Church and State if it succeeded, and (of course), the Constitution, whether or no;
Charles Dickens
#48. We fought for equality for all, for women too. For freethinking, fighting the lies of church and state, for what Nat called the Republic of Letters. That was what we believed in twenty years ago. But now, seems like all that has gone. It's church and Sunday best, and votes for men." "What
M.J. Carter
#49. The separation of church and state was meant to protect church from state; a state that declares religion off limits in public life is a state that declares itself supreme over all religious values.
Ben Shapiro
#50. I am a conservative Republican, but I believe in democracy and the separation of church and state. The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please as long as they don't hurt anyone else in the process.
Barry Goldwater
#51. I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be nonsectarian and no public moneys appropriated for sectarian schools.
Theodore Roosevelt
#52. The separation of church and state grew out of a desire, not so much to protect government from religion, but to protect religion from government.
Anna Quindlen
#53. I believe in the absolute separation of church and state and in the strict enforcement of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Al Smith
#54. Declare Church and State forever separate and distinct, but each free within their proper spheres, and that all church property shall bear its own proportion of taxation.
Ulysses S. Grant
#55. I think church and state should remain entirely separate at all costs, and that the decision of religious marriage should be of each faith to debate and decide free of political influence.
Adam Rickitt
#56. I believe in the separation of church and state, absolutely. But I don't believe in the separation of public life from our values, our basic values, and for many of us, our religious values.
Jim Wallis
#57. The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.
William Rehnquist
#58. The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building.
James Russell Lowell
#59. Anybody that believes in separation of church and state needs to leave right now.
Star Parker
#60. Our forefathers understood the dangers of consolidated power. This is why they provided for a separation of powers within the U.S. Government between the three branches. For the very same reason, the First Amendmants provides for a separation of church and state.
Barry McGowan
#61. After all, church and state simply did not mix. You could claim it when it looked good or you needed the evangelical vote, but beyond that it clearly didn't influence the government of the day.
Kenneth Evans
#62. To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don't understand Islam to be a church.
Stanley Hauerwas
#63. There are some who invoke separation of church and state - to try to get the government out of the business of morality - but this is antithetical to what the founders wanted. The founders wanted to keep theology out of government so that government could focus on the proper business of morality.
Dinesh D'Souza
#64. Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.
Henry Adams
#65. I wish, in America, (that) we were as concerned about separation from church and sin as we are about separation between church and state. Church and sin
it's a monstrous problem.
Leonard Ravenhill
#66. It was in this year, 1828, that the standard of "the Christian Party in Politics" was openly unfurled ... This was an evident attempt, through the influence of the clergy over the female mind - until this hour lamentably neglected in the United States - to effect a union of Church and State.
Frances Wright
#67. From you we have learned what we, at least, value, to separate Church and State; and from you we gather inspiration at all times in our devotion to learning, to religious liberty, and to individual and National freedom.
Seth Low
#68. I don't believe there is a separation of church and state. I think the Constitution is very clear. The only separation is that there will not be a government church.
Tom DeLay
#69. The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. [Progressive]
Hugo Black
#70. Church and state are, and must remain, separate.
Ronald Reagan
#71. The country is almost ruined with pious white people: such pious politicians as we have just before elections, such pious goings on in all departments of church and state, that a fellow does not know who'll cheat him next.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#72. The contemporary quarrel over church and state is not really about whether a wall of separation of church and state should exist or not ... The real question is what does 'separation' mean?
James Davison Hunter
#73. US is a very religious country. Separation of church and state is part of our credo, but that it is hard to understand since our money says "In God we trust" and every President says "God bless America".
Madeleine Albright
#74. The arbitrary division between church and state ... is used, as an easily identifiable rallying point, to subdue the opinions of that vast body of citizens who represent those with religious convictions.
Francis Schaeffer
#75. I am tolerant of all creeds. Yet if any sect suffered itself to be used for political objects I would meet it by political opposition. In my view church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact. Religion and politics should not be mingled.
Millard Fillmore
#76. The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed; Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God.
James Russell Lowell
#77. The disconnection of Church and State was a master stroke for freedom and harmony.
Josiah Warren
#78. Separation of church and state' meant freedom to worship, not freedom from worship.
Larry Schweikart
#79. The liberal understanding of 'the separation of church and state' means that as the area of politics expands, the area of private freedom - religious and otherwise - shrinks.
Joseph Sobran
#80. There's a reason we seperate Church and State. The reason for the richness and the diversity of religion in this nation is because of the seperation of Church and State, and there are people out there who can't wait to make this nation a nation of one religion ... THEIR religion.
Phil Donahue
#81. To Western eyes and ears, Sharia law seems devoid of respect for differences of opinion or complex moral thinking. Certainly the American idea of separation between church and state is lost in Sharia-style governance.
Jay Parini
#82. I talk about a Christianity that is enlightened enough to separate spirituality from the rest of life. Not just church and state, but knowledge and church.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#83. We have this idea in our minds that there's this separation of church and state in America, which I think is a good thing. And we extend that to our politics - not just church and state, but it's also there's a separation of religion and politics. But of course there isn't.
Stephen Colbert
#84. Thomas Jefferson declared, stating that he was speaking on behalf of the other founding fathers, ... (that) we should build a wall between the church and state.
Jimmy Carter
#85. We were environmentalists of the Teddy Roosevelt theory. We believed in separation of church and state. We believed in the independence of the Supreme Court not being subject to politicians.
Pete McCloskey
#86. The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.
James Russell Lowell
#87. The equality that we are all entitled to, as citizens of this democracy, can't be avoided by some religious dogma of a President who's is supposed to believe in the notion of separation of church and state. And he frankly doesn't.
Rosie O'Donnell
#88. The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.
Ron Paul
#89. I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion.
Antonin Scalia
#90. Lord, there's danger in this land, you get witch hunts and wars when church and state hold hands.
Joni Mitchell
#91. I believed what my father taught me about the separation of church and state, so when I was President I never invited Billy Graham to have services in the White House because I didn't think that was appropriate. He was injured a little bit, until I explained it to him.
Jimmy Carter
#92. The fact that we became a nation and immediately separated church and state - it has saved us from all the misery that has beset mankind with inquisitions, internecine and civil wars, and other assorted ills.
Dumas Malone
#93. It is the wall of separation between church and state ... that is largely responsible for religion thriving in this country, as compared to those European countries in which church and state have been united, resulting in opposition to the church by those who disapprove of the government.
Alan Dershowitz
#94. America wasn't founded as a theocracy. America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn't bloody and barbaric. That's why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.
Gregory A. Boyd
#95. The Supreme Court's 1947 decision which introduced the wall of separation between church and state 'has fueled a movement to sterilize anything in American public life from religion.'
Mickey Edwards
#96. I do not make decisions [as governor] based on what have I learned through my Bible studies, what have I learned in my religious classes in school. I'm a big believer in separation of church and state, and I think that's what ... the law is.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#97. There is no relationship here between Church and State. Religious liberty has its unalterable place, along with civil and human liberty, in the very foundation of the Republic. I hold it [religious intolerance] to be a menace to the very liberties which we boast and cherish.
Warren G. Harding
#98. I don't know that the Libertarian Party has an official position on the separation of church and state.
Michael Badnarik
#99. Separation of church and state is the big club pulled out to beat back the Christians .
David Barton
#100. But separation of church and state was never meant to separate God and government.
Roy Moore
