Quotes About The Separation Of Church And State

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. And I strongly support the faith-based initiative that we're proposing, because I don't believe it violates the line between the separation of church and state, and I believe it's going to make America a better place.

George W. Bush

#4. We need to remember that the separation of church and state must never mean the separation of religious values from the lives of public servants ... If we who serve free men today are to differ from the tyrants of this age, we must balance the powers in our hands with God in our hearts.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#5. You're telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?

Christine O'Donnell

#6. I fully understand it's important to maintain the separation of church and state. We don't want the state to become the church, nor do we want the church to become the state.

George W. Bush

#7. The ACLU sees the separation of church and state as so absolute that not a single religious word must be allowed to pass a schoolhouse door.

Nat Hentoff

#8. They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not
meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#9. Usually, it is not my habit to address religious issues on the floor. I strongly believe in a person's right to religious freedom, as well as the separation of church and state.

Alcee Hastings

#10. It might be said that religious freedom in the American sense, incorporating the separation of church and state, has been the pivotal concept of the national development of the United States of America.

Joseph Leon Blau

#11. The tenet of the separation of church and state is an unconstitutional doctrine.

Sharron Angle

#12. The separation of church and state has been a cornerstone of American democracy for over two hundred years. Getting rid of it was long overdue.

Samuel Alito

#13. Anytime you hear the concept of the separation of church and state being talked about these days, it is never in regard to maintaining the restraints on government; instead, it is always talking about what Christians and churches cannot do.

D. James Kennedy

#14. I don't know that the Libertarian Party has an official position on the separation of church and state.

Michael Badnarik

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. It doesn't say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state.

Sean Hannity

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.

George Washington

#32. The idea of America's religious groups fighting over the limited public money to be made available takes us down the road towards the kind of sectarian competition that has torn so many nations apart, and which our separation of church and state has spared us.

David Saperstein

#33. I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an Atheist. We have separation of church and state in the United States of America.

John F. Kerry

#34. Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

Sandra Day O'Connor

#35. Separation of church and state is the big club pulled out to beat back the Christians .

David Barton

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas.

Ronald Reagan

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. Roger Williams died sometime during the early months of 1683. Some of what he said and wrote during his lifetime belongs to the seventeenth century. But much of his historical and philosophical record speaks to us across the centuries.

Alan E. Johnson

#45. Christians - at least Christians in a liberal democracy - have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#46. There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Jerry Falwell

#47. It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.

Christopher Hitchens

#48. Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Ronald Reagan

#49. They have kept us in submission because they have talked about separation of church and state. There is no such thing in the Constitution. It's a lie of the left, and we're not going to take it anymore.

Pat Robertson

#50. The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of thought and belief a logical next step.

Joshua Wolf Shenk

#51. If marriage really is a sacred institution, then why is the government controlling it, especially in a nation that affirms separation of church and state?

Tony Campolo

#52. The fundamental basis of this nation's laws was given to Moses on the Mount ... If we don't have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.

Harry Truman

#53. We believe in separation of church and state, that there should be no unwarranted influence on the church or religion by the state, and vice versa.

Jimmy Carter

#54. I disagree strongly with the concept of separation of church and state. It was not written into the Constitution.

Ken Buck

#55. The way liberals are interpreting the First Amendment today is that it prevents anyone who is religious from being in government.

Rush Limbaugh

#56. It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.

Roy Moore

#57. In the case Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court ruled that - under 'separation of church and state' - it was unconstitutional for a student in school to even see a copy of the Ten Commandments.

David Barton

#58. News, by and large, has been the purest of all the television mediums, or at least we've tried to keep it that way, and there constantly is the argument about the separation between church and state.

Leslie Moonves

#59. When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.

Harry A. Blackmun

#60. 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

#61. I believe this notion of separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel's imagination.

W. A. Criswell

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Christopher Hitchens

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

Robert A. Heinlein

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.

Thomas Paine

#87. 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

#88. [W]hen they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall it selfe, removed the Candlestick, &c. and made his Garden a Wildernesse, as at this day.

Roger Williams