Top 100 Quotes About The Church And State
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Governor Winthrop despised democracy, which he brusquely labeled "the meanest and worst of all forms of Government." For Puritans, the church and state worked in tandem; the coercive arm of the magistracy was meant to preserve both public order and class distinctions.
Nancy Isenberg
#6. 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
#7. I believe this notion of separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel's imagination.
W. A. Criswell
#8. The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism is hostile to religion is a lie.
Adolf Hitler
#9. Calvi was sobbing. This couldn't be! A moment ago the Pope was healthy, smiling. How could His Holiness be no longer? Only a month into his papacy!
Peter J. Tanous
#10. The Constitution separated the ideologies and values of the Church from the State, and leaders of the State were thus educated in matters pertaining to the State. These leaders proved themselves time after time with their pragmatic intellectual capacities.
Mike Medavoy
#11. It is the conflicting interests of the man and the woman, the home and the shop, the Church and the State, which cause the economic struggle, the war and the strife with which mankind is cursed and which make all long and pray for the reign of peace.
Max Heindel
#12. The church, the state, and the poor, are 3 daughters which we should maintain, but not portion off.
Benjamin Franklin
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. As humanism begins to dominate the state, the consequence is complete hostile annexation of the church or persecution by separation. Religion is then removed from the marketplace and the school, later from other domains of public life. The state will not toerlate any gods besides itself.
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#20. If the state - and within the state, the judiciary particularly - harasses and undermines the Church , in any society the state undoes itself.
Russell Kirk
#21. 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
#22. Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains its value undiminished even in our time when the outlook of men and the state of the world have undergone such profound changes.
Pope Paul VI
#23. A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?
James Russell Lowell
#24. 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
#25. If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
Felix Frankfurter
#26. 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
#27. The church that took two thousand years to build in Iraq and Syria, started by the apostles themselves, has nearly been destroyed in the blink of an eye at the hands of manics who won't stop until they win or they die. At least that's what everyone I met in Iraq believes. Every single one of them.
Johnnie Moore
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. [The Drafters of the Constitution] were intent on avoiding more than 100 years of religious intolerance and persecution in American colonial history and an even longer heritage of church-state problems in Europe.
John M Swomley
#31. When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God.
Shane Claiborne
#32. The coziness between church and state is good for the state and bad for the church
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#33. 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
#34. Some people have a fear of rejecting all the security that comes with family, church and state. They become fundamentalists.
Harold Ramis
#35. Church and State are both rent, by the tugging of the demonic and the Divine
Martin Luther
#36. 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
#37. The unholy alliance of religion and politics collaborated in finding Jesus guilty.
Eugene H. Peterson
#38. To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.
Paul Ricoeur
#39. How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
Christopher Hitchens
#40. Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lone lines.
Russell Kirk
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the ... school ... is a very different thing from appointing the state as educator of the people. Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.
Karl Marx
#44. [Disestablishment was] the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.
Lyman Beecher
#45. This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.
Gore Vidal
#47. The promise of a social gospel was for Luther an irrelevant and ultimately irrelevant and ultimately cruel delusion.
Andrew Pettegree
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#51. 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
#52. The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.
James Madison
#53. Real faith is never something that can be forced by the state. It's something that either be encouraged and smiled upon or discouraged and frowned-upon. Or, simply crushed
Eric Metaxas
#54. 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
#55. Too often, our concept of pastors and church leaders reinforces rather than obliterates the sad state of family life in our current context.
Russell D. Moore
#56. The gospel that has been preached in our churches has not been fair to the African continent. It has left us in a beggarly state, waiting on God for things we could produce by and for ourselves.
Sunday Adelaja
#57. I always say that no matter what the torture is, or the tool is, first of all it's nothing worse than what's been done already and that wasn't done by the church and the state for over a period of 250 years during the European witch trials.
Eli Roth
#58. 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
#59. The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.
Carl Sagan
#60. It doesn't say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state.
Sean Hannity
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. The Church, however, is a self-governing society, distinct from the State, having its officers and laws, and, therefore, an administrative government of its own.
Charles Hodge
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. It may never be said that like the state and the church, science arose because of sin and thus from an intervening grace.
Abraham Kuyper
#68. Two orders of mankind are the enemies of church and state; the king without clemency, and the holy man without learning.
Saadi
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
Charles Bukowski
#72. The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.
E.L. Doctorow
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
#80. Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state.
Paul Feyerabend
#81. Baptists have long upheld the ideal of a free church in a free state. And from the beginning, they believed that forcing a person to worship against his will violated the principles of both Christianity and civility.
George W. Bush
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The second is the release from the principle of authority, that is, from any obligation to obey parents, the Church, the state, and whoever places restrictions in the name of the common good. The
Fr Gabriele Amorth
#85. The more I do bookstores, the more people come up to me from church groups. I spoke at Pittsburg State College and had 2 or 3 ministers and book groups from a couple of churches.
Anita Diament
#86. For the spiritual sense of the Word treats everywhere of the spiritual world, that is, of the state of the church in the heavens, as well as in the earth; hence the Word is spiritual and Divine.
Emanuel Swedenborg
#87. Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Robert A. Heinlein
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Both state and church have as their object actions as well as convictions, the former insofar as they are based on the relations between man and nature, the latter insofar as they are based on the relations between nature and God.
Moses Mendelssohn
#92. 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
#93. I think it's already apparent that a good part of this Nation understands - if only instinctively - that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church, is wrong and dangerous.
Mario Cuomo
#94. Martin Luther King Jr. really understood the role of the churches when he said, 'The church is not meant to be the master of the state.' We don't sort of take power and grab the levers of government and impose our agenda down people's throats.
Jim Wallis
#95. Free people make the only milieu possible in society for the full gift of one's self to church, state, and family. Free people enjoy and sustain and feel with one another because they live for one another. The paths of life are intermingled lives.
Haniel Long
#96. The First Amendment has created a wall of separation between the church and the State. But that wall is one directional. It is to keep the government from running the Church. But it is not to keep Christian principles out of the government.
Thomas Jefferson
#97. The roots of copyright lie in censorship. It was easy for state and church to control thought by controlling the scribes, but then the printing press came along and the authorities worried that they couldn't control official thought as easily.
Stephan Kinsella
#98. 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
#99. Forget the state concerns
we think this is bad for churches. Most churches are small and not ready to handle 500 pages of government red tape.
Michael Tanner
#100. 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
