Religion And State Quotes

#1. The founding fathers went out of their way to establish a clear "wall of separation" between religion and state, to quote Thomas Jefferson. They reasoned, as James Madison so cleverly articulated, that both religion and government exist in greater purity if kept apart.

Phil Zuckerman

#2. Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.

Brandon Sanderson

#3. 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

#4. Love does not exist, it's like religion, the state wants you to believe in that kind of crap so they can control you, and f**k your head up.

Irvine Welsh

#5. Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain.

Friedrich Engels

#6. 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

#7. A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the
state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion,
of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the
fashionable idols!

Ludwig Von Mises

#8. Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life").

Kazimir Malevich

#9. A just laicism allows religious freedom. The state does not impose religion but rather gives space to religions with a responsibility toward civil society, and therefore it allows these religions to be factors in building up society.

Pope Benedict XVI

#10. Be advised what thou dost discourse of, and what thou maintainest whether touching religion, state, or vanity; for if thou err in the first, thou shalt be accounted profane; if in the second, dangerous; if in the third, indiscreet and foolish.

Walter Raleigh

#11. Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either.

Mahatma Gandhi

#12. A people's theology reflects the state of it's children's bottoms.

Aldous Huxley

#13. In respect to religion and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of barbarism. In the most civilized countries the priest is still but a Powwow, and the physician a Great Medicine.

Henry David Thoreau

#14. One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

Thomas Paine

#15. The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.

Moses Mendelssohn

#16. 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

#17. Such is my veneration for every religion that reveals the attributes of the Deity, or a future state of rewards and punishments, that I had rather see the opinions of Confucius or Mahomed inculcated upon our youth than see them grow up wholly devoid of a system of religious principles.

Benjamin Rush

#18. Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.

Camille Paglia

#19. We were busy judging everyone's spiritual state. We had a lot to do. Only God might be able to see their hearts and innermost thoughts, but we had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go for plenty of folks on the Judgment Day. Not so well.

Frank Schaeffer

#20. If chance be the Father of all flesh,
Disaster is his rainbow in the sky,
And when you hear
State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!
It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.

Steve Turner

#21. I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.

Zbigniew Herbert

#22. What they [the 9/11 attackers] abominate about 'the west', to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.

Christopher Hitchens

#23. My concern is to keep religion and the state separated. I don't think that religion and politics go together. When you see political decisions colored by religion, decisions that affect us all ... I thought: 'I do not want to go back to medieval times.'

Bjorn Ulvaeus

#24. There must be religion. When that ligament is torn, society is disjointed and its members perish ... [T]he most important of all lessons is the denunciation of ruin to every state that rejects the precepts of religion.

Gouverneur Morris

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

Robert A. Heinlein

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and beneficence.

Moses Mendelssohn

#29. 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

#30. Women become the objects of rules; they are repressed and lose their rights in the name of religion, or they lose their freedom in the name of tradition, while the state legitimates this foolishness with laws.

Okky Madasari

#31. Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life. Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich

#32. The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Chris Hedges

#33. I figure if there is a God, She's good and surged right now about the state of things down here.

Hillary Jordan

#34. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs.

Bertrand Russell

#35. An enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state, confounds the civil and religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.

Roger Williams

#36. The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.

Baruch Spinoza

#37. Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#38. For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable: When religion defines morality, the wall between church and state comes to be seen as immoral.

Ellen Willis

#39. 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

#40. It is worth noting that the people today who so vehemently wish to sweep religion from all public spaces and institutions are also the same people who consistently oppose freedom. They want only one God &emdash; the state, which of course they intend to run.

Charley Reese

#41. Whenever we use our religion, as individuals, or as groups within the church, to act in tandem with political and economic groups that arrest the voice of truth or destroy others, then we are Judas.

Megan McKenna

#42. Modern society, the political body, the legal and judiciary system, the state of governance, capitalism and the very fabric of the society itself, including our religions and so-called morals and values, are institutions steeped in traditions of absolute and total violence.

Bryant McGill

#43. In a word, the free Church in a free State has been the programme which led me to my first efforts, and which I continue to regard as just and true, reasonable and practical, after the studies of thirty years.

Camillo Benso, Count Of Cavour

#44. Since the dawn of time, warring combatants have regularly reached for what support they could find to nerve their own side for battle.

Mark A. Noll

#45. 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

#46. Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of god and the sexually nonconformist as existing in a state of incurable mortal sin that can incidentally cause floods and earthquakes.

Christopher Hitchens

#47. Everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened.

Julian Barnes

#48. 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

#49. In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#50. [W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?

E. O. Wilson

#51. And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. The Prince, XVIII, 5

Niccolo Machiavelli

#52. 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

#53. Religion is for the man in humble life, and to raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a state in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and may be more than equal by virtue.

Edmund Burke

#54. The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.

Willa Cather

#55. Who are we, this government or this country, to redefine the term marriage that has meant one man and one woman across cultures, across ages, across geographical barriers since before state and religion themselves?

Tim Loughton

#56. Some in the West suggest that Isam needs a separation of mosque and state. However, in the case of Iran at least what is needed is a separation lof religion and business.

Amir Taheri

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

Christopher Hitchens

#58. The unholy alliance of religion and politics collaborated in finding Jesus guilty.

Eugene H. Peterson

#59. 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

#60. The obligation of the state is to guarantee freedom of religion, and that implies dealing with all of them on an equal footing.

Ricardo Alarcon

#61. God requireth not an uniformity of Religion to be inacted and inforced in any civill state.

Roger Williams

#62. 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

#63. When state and religion are one, religion becomes a means for the powerful to remain in power.

Walter Jon Williams

#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. The state (the U.S. Constitution) has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire.

Pope Pius IX

#66. I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state.

Noah Feldman

#67. 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

#68. In the relationship between man and religion, the state is firmly committed to a position of neutrality.

Tom C. Clark

#69. Religion gives us a place to stand outside politics, and without it we're vulnerable to a system in which the state defines everything, which is the essence of tyranny.

R. R. Reno

#70. You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#71. In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.

Immanuel Kant

#72. 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

#73. The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.

Mitt Romney

#74. 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

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

W. A. Criswell

#76. 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

#77. 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

#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 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

#80. Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.

Sam Ervin

#81. 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

#82. It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State.

Max Stirner

#83. All talk on Islamic States is just an empty dream. No man in his right sense would accept a nation which bases its political administration on religion, and in a country like Malaysia with its multiracial and multireligious people, there is no room for an Islamic State.

Tunku Abdul Rahman

#84. Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!

Fulton J. Sheen

#85. 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

#86. Can-do Americans courageously go about their duty in Iraq - mostly unafraid that a culture of 2,000 years, the reality of geography, the sheer forces of language and religion, the propaganda of state-run Arab media and the cynicism of the liberal West are all stacked against them.

Victor Davis Hanson

#87. 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

#88. A state of temperance, sobriety and justice without devotion is a cold, lifeless, insipid condition of virtue, and is rather to be styled philosophy than religion.

Joseph Addison

#89. 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

#90. In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.

William Robertson Smith

#91. 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

#92. Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist.

James Baldwin

#93. Religion, society and state - from none of these do women get their proper honor. It is religion, which has created an unparalleled disparity between men and women.

Taslima Nasrin

#94. Everybody had one thing in common: we were all taught to hate Israel and the Jews. In the universal hatred that was preached against Jews, virtually no distinction was made between the Jewish religion and the Israeli state. In my Christian private school, we studied only the New Testament.

Brigitte Gabriel

#95. Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.

Robert Reich

#96. 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

#97. The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers, and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion.

John Boyd Orr

#98. Faith is not mere belief but is that state you attain when you send your will, words, thoughts, beliefs, and actions into orbit around a chosen goal

Agona Apell

#99. Oh, there's going to be debate because you're dealing with the Bible and religion is supposed to be separate from state and that to me is already a conflict before it even hits the gay issue.

Pam Grier

#100. If war is the health of the state, despair is the health of religion. Until African workers and peasants find belief systems that provides them with real hope of happiness in the here and now, they will continue to grasp at religion's false hope of happiness in the hereafter.

Anonymous