Quotes About Religious Liberty

#1. The Founders believed that pluralism survived only within the concept of religious liberty espoused by American Christianity.

David Barton

#2. Religious liberty is the first freedom in our Constitution. And whether the cause is justice for the persecuted, compassion for the needy and the sick, or mercy for the child waiting to be born, there is no greater force for good in the nation than Christian conscience in action.

Mitt Romney

#3. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

G.K. Chesterton

#4. I predict that the time will come in this once free America when the battle for religious liberty will have to be fought over again, and will probably be lost, because the people are already ignorant of its true basis and conditions.

Robert Dabney

#5. When religion controls government, political liberty dies; and when government controls religion, religious liberty perishes.

Sam Ervin

#6. It has been lately urged in a very respectable quarter that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty all over the globe, and especially over this continent - even by force, if necessary. It is a sad delusion.

John C. Calhoun

#7. America was founded to be a beacon of liberty, particularly religious liberty. The framers of our Constitution sought to preserve religious liberty to such an extent that they made it the first right protected in the Bill of Rights.

Edwin Meese

#8. It is a bipartisan gathering to be able to pray for the needs back in our districts, for our families and each other. Another thing the prayer caucus does is to address religious liberty issues around the country as they arise.

James Lankford

#9. Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.

Samuel Adams

#10. I believe in religious liberty. I believe in freedom of speech. I believe in working hard and playing by the rules. I'm showing up for work tomorrow.

William J. Clinton

#11. Let the pulpit resound with the doctrine and sentiments of religious liberty. Let us hear of the dignity of man's nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God ... Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes and parliaments.

John Adams

#12. Freedom possesses many meanings. It speaks not merely in terms of political and religious liberty but also in terms of economic and social progress.

Robert Kennedy

#13. Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.

Clarence Thomas

#14. Descendants of New England pioneers are proud of their ancestry and glad to proclaim the fact that so far as the United States are concerned, New England is in deed the cradle of religious liberty.

Paul Harris

#15. As a preacher who has spent significant time in churches and houses of worship all across the country, I can tell you firsthand that religious liberty and freedom are principles that can never be infringed upon.

Al Sharpton

#16. The more people come together, the more borders will be opened and people and opinions get together, the more unrenouncable tolerance will be a fundamental part of our social life. Without tolerance there is no religious liberty, no freedom of conscience and no freedom of thought.

Thomas Klestil

#17. I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the First Amendment's guarantees of religious liberty ... Neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test - even by indirection.

John F. Kennedy

#18. There must be absolute religious liberty, for tyranny and intolerance are as abhorrent in matters intellectual and spiritual as in matters political and material; and more and more we must all realize that conduct is of infinitely greater importance than dogma.

Theodore Roosevelt

#19. President Obama orders religious organizations to violate their conscience. I will defend religious liberty and overturn regulations that trample on our first freedom.

Mitt Romney

#20. Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

James Russell Lowell

#21. The First Amendment exists to protect our religious liberty
to ensure that all Americans are able to seek out worship God with all our hearts, free from government coercion; it does not mandate scouring the public square to forcibly remove all acknowledgement s of the Almighty

Ted Cruz

#22. Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which prevades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.

James Madison

#23. Religious liberty doesn't include encouraging a fellow American to engage in violent jihad and kill an American here. That is not protected free speech. That is not protected religious belief.

George Pataki

#24. But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If

G.K. Chesterton

#25. A church can only stand for religious liberty if it knows that the Judgment Seat of Christ is more ultimate than the state.

Russell D. Moore

#26. This shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty.

Francis Schaeffer

#27. From the dissensions among Sects themselves arise necessarily a right of choosing and necessity of deliberating to which we will conform. But if we choose for ourselves, we must allow others to choose also, and so reciprocally, this establishes religious liberty.

Thomas Jefferson

#28. I have been proud to fight and stand for religious liberty, to stand against Planned Parenthood, to defend life for my entire career.

Ted Cruz

#29. He establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive that induced me to the field of battle.

George Washington

#30. Freedom has only the meaning with which men endow it. It is not enough to pay lip service to the concept of religious liberty. We must pay heart service to it as well, else it remains an empty phrase instead of a living reality.

Kenneth Keating

#31. I'm a religious liberty supporter - I strongly believe in that.

Rob Portman

#32. The notion of religious liberty is that you cannot be forced to participate in a religious ceremony that's not of your choosing simply because you're out-voted.

Ira Glasser

#33. Where's Barack Obama when Christmas references are being erased from civic calendars? Is he crying out in defense of religious liberty and our First Amendment? Nope. He's as silent as a church mouse. And animosity toward religion continues to grow.

Chuck Norris

#34. What good is religious liberty if it can only be practiced behind stained-glass windows on Sunday?

Ralph E. Reed Jr.

#35. I think it is wrong for the federal government to force Christian individuals, businesses, pastors, churches to participate in wedding ceremonies that violate our sincerely held religious beliefs. We have to stand up and fight for religious liberty. That's where this fight is going.

Bobby Jindal

#36. In the United States, constitutional guarantees of religious liberty protect the church from actions that might otherwise be considered abusive or in violation of laws in human trafficking or labor standards.

Lawrence Wright

#37. Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#38. The United States didn't create religious liberty. Religious liberty created the United States of America. It's the reason we are here today. This is an essential freedom and an essential right and I don't think you give up this right by simply taking a job.

Bobby Jindal

#39. A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. Protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.

Samuel Alito

#40. 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

#41. I have spent almost my entire adult life fighting to defend the religious liberty of every American to follow his or her faith and live according to his conscience.

Ted Cruz

#42. Freedom arises from a multiplicity of sects, which pervades America, and is the best and only security for religious liberty in America.

James Madison

#43. The United States should be an asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty.

Thomas Paine

#44. We may continue to expect the enjoyment of all the blessings of civil and religious liberty, guaranteed by the Constitution. The citizens of Illinois have done themselves honor, in throwing the mantle of the Constitution over a persecuted and afflicted people.

Joseph Smith Jr.

#45. My greatest concern is that Mitt Romney seldom addresses the social issues publicly ... I'm referring to the sanctity of human life, the traditional definition of marriage, and religious liberty.

James Dobson

#46. Remember civil and religious liberty always go together: if the foundation of the one be sapped, the other will fall of course.

Alexander Hamilton

#47. The State may justify a limitation on religious liberty by showing it is essential to accomplish an overriding governmental interest.

Warren E. Burger

#48. Religious liberty must be protected in this country. It's a principle upon which we were founded.

Carly Fiorina

#49. I would sign an executive order protecting religious liberty, our first amendment rights, so Christian business owners and individuals don't face discrimination for having a traditional view of marriage.

Bobby Jindal

#50. Realizing that they can't get their agenda across: against religious liberty, against a culture of life, they can't get those issues across through the legislature, as people respond and their elected officials represent them, so they attempt to do it through the courts.

Rod Parsley

#51. What I am for is protecting, with the highest standards in our courts, the religious liberty of Hoosiers.

Mike Pence

#52. I had displeased the jacobins by blaming their aristocratic usurpation of legitimate powers; the priests of all sorts by claiming religious liberty; the anarchists by repressing them; and the conspirators by rejecting their offers.

Marquis De Lafayette

#53. 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

#54. The sole purpose and effect of it is to exclude persecution and to secure the important right of religious liberty.

Oliver Ellsworth

#55. I think it is appropriate that we pay tribute to this great constitutional principle which is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution: the principle of religious independence, of religious liberty, of religious freedom.

John F. Kennedy

#56. I believe that the most essential element of our defense of freedom is our insistence on speaking out for the cause of religious liberty.

Ronald Reagan

#57. It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.

Sandra Day O'Connor

#58. We are gonna to have to choose as a nation between the homosexual agenda and freedom because the two cannot coexist. Every advance of the homosexual agenda, comes at the expense of liberty, particularly religious liberty.

Bryan Fischer

#59. While the struggle for religious liberty had proceeded without large-scale bloodshed in New England and elsewhere in the United States, the struggle for political liberty had not fared so well.

Paul Harris

#60. The Founding Faith, then, was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty - a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.

Steven Waldman

#61. Religious freedom certainly means the right to worship God, individually and in community, as our consciences dictate. But religious liberty, by its nature, transcends places of worship and the private sphere of individuals and families.

Pope Francis

#62. One of the worst consequences politically would be for the majority of Democrats to vote for someone who, in the near future, would overturn well-established precedents on clean air, clean water, privacy, equal opportunity and religious liberty.

Ralph Neas

#63. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

Abraham Lincoln

#64. On the issues of religious liberty, the Supreme Court continues to scrape against the bedrock of the American spirit.

Gary Bauer

#65. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

Richard Dawkins

#66. Perhaps religious conscience upsets the designs of those who feel that the highest wisdom and authority comes from government. But from the beginning, this nation trusted in God, not man. Religious liberty is the first freedom in our Constitution.

Mitt Romney

#67. Religious liberty should be a bipartisan issue.

Ted Cruz

#68. Sound morals, religious liberty, and a just sense of religious responsibility are essentially connected with all true and lasting happiness.

William Henry Harrison

#69. By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion; and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed upon the same equal footing, and are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty.

Samuel Chase

#70. President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It's about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who's next?

Michelle Malkin

#71. [Religious liberty was] in its nature an inalienable right ... because the opinions of men, depending only upon the evidence contemplated by their minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men.

James Madison

#72. Many Muslim countries are closed to missionaries, a policy Christians see as a denial of religious liberty.

Bob Abernethy

#73. If we really want to cherish religious freedom, people who want to believe that same-sex marriage should take place, they have a right to believe that, and people who want to believe it's inappropriate, we should not demonize those people - if we really believe in religious liberty.

Foster Friess

#74. I believe in the support of the public school as one of the cornerstones of American liberty. I believe in the right of every parent to choose whether his child shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school supported by those of his own faith.

Al Smith

#75. No man is truly free who is in financial bondage. 'Think what you do when you run in debt', said Benjamin Franklin, 'you give another power over your liberty.'

Ezra Taft Benson

#76. It is no more the function of government to impose a moral code than to impose a religious code. And for the same reason.

Robert Morrison MacIver

#77. I have often expressed my sentiments, that every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.

George Washington

#78. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally.

Patrick Pearse

#79. No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism.

Harold Laski

#80. The emigrants although of different parties and different religious sects all flew from persecution in pursuit of liberty.

James Monroe

#81. While we are contending for our own liberty, we should be very cautious not to violate the conscience of others, ever considering that God alone is the judge of the hearts of men, and to Him only in this case are they answerable.

George Washington

#82. An irresistible passion that would induce me to believe in innate ideas and the truth of prophecy has decided my career. I have always loved liberty with the enthusiasm which actuates the religious man with the passion of a lover and with the conviction of a geometrician.

Marquis De Lafayette

#83. Where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty.

Anonymous

#84. No real social change has ever been
brought about without a revolution -
Revolution is but thought carried into action.
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment,
for science, for religious, political, and
economic liberty, emanates from the minority,
and not from the mass.

Emma Goldman

#85. We see our liberties curtailed more and more and more.We see a tremendous attack on religious freedom.

Rafael Cruz

#86. A self-conscious society will therefore endeavor to limit sect forming by providing for the widest possible diffusion of secular knowledge.

Edward Alsworth Ross

#87. Of course, there are dangers in religious freedom and freedom of opinion. But to deny these rights is worse than dangerous, it is absolutely fatal to liberty.

Harry S. Truman

#88. [T]he superstitions to be feared in the present day are much less religious than political; and of all the forms of idolatry I know none more irrational and ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers. - William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty

Bryan Caplan

#89. In France, religion had been considered the enemy of liberty, but in America, as George Washington expressed it, religion and morality were the 'twin pillars of freedom.'

D. James Kennedy

#90. The civil rights of none, shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.

James Madison

#91. The liberty enjoyed by the people of these states of worshiping Almighty God agreebly to their conscience, is not only among the choicest of their blessings, but also of their rights.

George Washington

#92. The greater the share the people have in government, the less liberty, civil or religious, does a nation enjoy.

John Wesley

#93. The birthright of man ... is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#94. Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

Thomas Jefferson

#95. It is not in our forming battlements or bristling seacoasts, or our Army and Navy that makes America great - but rather our reliance in the law of liberty and the religious law God has planted in us.

Abraham Lincoln

#96. In our early struggles for liberty, religious freedom could not fail to become a primary object.

Thomas Jefferson

#97. If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

Mark Twain

#98. Persecution on racial and religious grounds has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty.

Nicholas Murray Butler

#99. The only foundation for ... a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.

Benjamin Rush

#100. All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution.

Thomas Jefferson