Religious Law Quotes

#1. When religious law becomes civil law, does the state not cease being secular, and become theocratic or theocentric?

Christina Engela

#2. I never felt like a good Jew. My mother was not Jewish, and that makes me a non-Jew according to Jewish religious law.

Stephane Hessel

#3. Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.

Jonathan Sacks

#4. Only greatly insolent people establish a religious law which is to be taken for granted by others, which should be accepted by everyone on faith, without any discussion or doubts. Why must people do this?

Leo Tolstoy

#5. 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

#6. Dan Moldea, the lead investigator for Larry Flynt's ongoing quest to uncover sexual indiscretions of Republican congressional members, has now admitted he was hired by the law firm defending President Clinton.

Jerry Falwell

#7. The Catholic teaching against murder, for example, is largely the same as our secular laws. But as a law, it obviously has a secular rationale at least as strong as its religious rationale.

Mario Cuomo

#8. A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.

Joan D. Chittister

#9. The basic problem affecting the Pakistan today is human rights. Islamic fundamentalists have no roots among the common people and while they are pushing hard for religious fundamentalists to take hold, the common people still seek change through humanitarian and common human rights law.

Abdul Sattar Edhi

#10. On the other hand, the cultivation of the religious sentiment represses licentiousnessinspires respect for law and order, and gives strength to the whole social fabric, at the same time that it conducts the human soul upward to the Author of its being.

Daniel Webster

#11. I don't care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do however care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively we cannot be good without God.

Wendy Kaminer

#12. Look at the history of civil laws in our world and the source from which they emerged, and you will see that the vast majority of them arose directly from, or where based in principle on, Roman Canon Law, or the laws of other religious origin. Sharia is another notable example.

Neale Donald Walsch

#13. Church doctrine has no place in secular law. You can't take away people's rights to meet your own religious criteria.

Marie Sexton

#14. The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature
: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#15. Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don't be upset when others decide you're an asshole.
[Blog post of July 26, 2011]

Jim C. Hines

#16. 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

#17. The religion that has to be supported by law is without value, not only, but a fraud and a curse. The religious argument that has to be supported by a musket is hardly worth making.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#18. It is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws ...

George Washington

#19. At first, laws evolved out of religious doctrines. It followed that they were recognized only when advantageous to those who practiced the same religion and who appeared equals under the protection of the same gods. For the members of all other cults, there was neither law nor mercy.

Leon Bourgeois

#20. Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. What a Utopia! What a paradise this region would be.

John Adams

#21. Whatever his private beliefs and religious practice, a president must be the guardian of the laws which ensure America's religious diversity.

Walter F. Mondale

#22. The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and in-grafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.

Thomas Jefferson

#23. Do not allow your sorrow or your rage to become hostility toward people on the basis of their ethnicity or their religious views. That is unacceptable; it is out of bounds, and if you break the law, we will prosecute you for it.

John Ashcroft

#24. If our life is not a course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.

William Law

#25. Under the law, the government, whether it's state, local or federal, cannot give the Catholic Church or any religious institution money directly.

Ed Rendell

#26. It is not simply a theological treatise, a code of laws, a religious homily, but the Bible - the book - while the only book for the soul, the best book for the mind

Herrick Johnson

#27. I am a believer, but I affirm that in public buildings the law of the Republic overrides religious rules.

Jean-Pierre Raffarin

#28. The true meaning of Christ's teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.

Leo Tolstoy

#29. Muhammad, my friend, I'm getting very scared. Teach me how to love my brothers who don't know the law, and what about the deal on the flying trapeze?

Tori Amos

#30. With regard to the moral and religious condition of the slaves, I cannot, either from what I observe, or from what is told me, consider it in any way gratifying.

Frederick Law Olmsted

#31. In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.

Andrew Sullivan

#32. Your love of liberty
your respect for the laws
your habits of industry
and your practice of the moral and religious obligations, are the strongest claims to national and individual happiness.

George Washington

#33. No obligation. Nor any restriction or limitation, nor any guidelines or rules. Nor are you bound by any circumstances or situations, nor constrained by any Code or law. Nor are you punishable for any offense, nor capable of any-for there is no such thing as being "offensive" in the eyes of God.

Neale Donald Walsch

#34. Nothing harms or destroys us but the wrong use of that liberty of choice which God has entrusted to us.

William Law

#35. It should be made clear that religious freedom DOES NOT include the right to persecute others, nor the right to take away their humanity and equal treatment before the law.

Christina Engela

#36. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.

Hillary Clinton

#37. We cannot permit any inquisition either within or without the law or apply any religious test to the holding of office. The mind of America must be forever free.

Calvin Coolidge

#38. women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.

Adam M. Grant

#39. 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

#40. The first duty of a government is to maintain law and order so that the life, property, and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the State.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

#41. Religious belief does not do away with either natural or human law from which sovereignty is derived.

Timothy Brook

#42. I think the media projected the case of Asia Bibi in a right way. They have given the importance of this case and especially how the blasphemy law is being misused for the victimization [of religious minorities].

Shahbaz Bhatti

#43. One hundred and one. No person above seventeen years of age shall have any benefit or protection of the law, or be capable of any place of profit or honor, who is not a member of some church or profession, having his name recorded in some one, and but one religious record at once.

John Locke

#44. It is from the traditional family that we absorb those universal ideals and principles which are the teaching of Jesus, the bedrock of our religious faith. We are taught the difference between right and wrong, and about the law, just punishment and discipline.

Kamisese Mara

#45. One of the genuine phenomenons over the past four decades has been the liberal community's steadfast insistence that God should be barred from the public sphere. This is not law. It is religious prejudice.

Armstrong Williams

#46. Our religious activities nowadays are using law to condemn people rather than instructing men in righteousness. We have a lot of religious activities in the land but they are not bearing a lot of fruits.

Patience Johnson

#47. Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual.

Benito Mussolini

#48. When people call for "deeds, not creeds," asking, "What Would Jesus Do?" without much interest in the query, "What has Jesus done?" identifying themselves as "spiritual but not religious," they are asking for the law without the gospel.

Michael S. Horton

#49. They don't want to feed an ISIS narrative that there is a religious war between Islam and the Christian West, plus genocide is carefully defined under international law.

Tom Gjelten

#50. My feeling is religious insofar as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand more deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature".

Albert Einstein

#51. You won't find your soul in a textbook, self-help book, or buy it in a store. Sometimes, it's just a matter of looking past the anger, regret, and envy to see its smiling face.

Charles F. Glassman

#52. The Law given from Sinai [The Ten Commandments] was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code.

John Quincy Adams

#53. When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool

Sydney Smith

#54. The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code; it contained many statutes ... of universal application-laws essential to the existence of men in society, and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws.

John Quincy Adams

#55. Freedom sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the safeguard of mores; and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its duration.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#56. He that rightly understands the reasonableness and Excellency of charity will know that it can never be excusable to waste any of our money in pride and folly.

William Law

#57. Religious faith may very well be considered a science, for it responds invariably to certain formulae. Perform the technique of faith according to the laws which have been proved workable in human experience and you will always get a result of power.

Norman Vincent Peale

#58. A law which attempts to say you can criticise and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.

Rowan Atkinson

#59. It is the truth of grace and not of the law that brings you true freedom. The truth of the law only binds you. In fact, religious bondage is one of the most crippling bondages with which a person can be encumbered. Religious bondage keeps one in constant fear, guilt, and anxiety.

Joseph Prince

#60. You are to think of yourself as only existing in this world to do God's will. To think that you are your own is as absurd as to think you are self-created. It is an obvious first principle that you belong completely to God.

William Law

#61. We do not read (the law) to elevate accommodation of religious observances over an institution's need to maintain order and safety, ... We have no cause to believe that (the law) would not be applied in an appropriately balanced way, without sensitivity to security concerns.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#62. On free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious coexistence, international law, and diplomatic immunity.

Jack Weatherford

#63. No religious doctrine shall be established by law.

Elbridge Gerry

#64. The only true order is founded on Biblical Law. All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion.

R.J. Rushdoony

#65. Divine love is perfect peace and joy, it is a freedom from all disquiet, it is all content and happiness; and makes everything to rejoice in itself.

William Law

#66. Culturally speaking, I was raised in a Jewish household. In addition to the religious side of it, I was taught respect for books and learning and the higher professions like medicine and law and teaching.

Woody Allen

#67. By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective.

Karen Armstrong

#68. Reading is good, hearing is good, conversation and meditation are good; but then, they are only good at times and occasions, in a certain degree, and must be used and governed with such caution as we eat and drink and refresh ourselves, or they will bring forth in us the fruits of intemperance.

William Law

#69. There was never law, or sect, or opinion did so much magnify goodness, as the Christian religion doth.

Francis Bacon

#70. The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the aid of Statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service.

Florence Nightingale

#71. Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious.

Criss Jami

#72. The law of prayer is the law of harvest: sow sparingly in prayer, reap sparingly; sow bountifully in prayer, reap bountifully. The trouble is we are trying to get from our efforts what we never put into them.

Leonard Ravenhill

#73. There was no law that explicitly banned women from driving in Saudi Arabia. There is none today - the Kingdom's notorious female driving ban is a matter of social convention, fortified by some ferocious religious pressures. So some Saudi women started looking thoughtfully at their Kuwaiti sisters.

Robert Lacey

#74. The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?

Nathan Myhrvold

#75. But who is to decide who truly fears the Lord? The magistrate has no power to enforce religious demands. The laws of the First Table of the Ten Commandments are not regulations for a civil society or a political order. They belong to the realm of religion, not politics.

Roger Williams

#76. We have such a law: If you forgive, it means that God has forgiven you; but if you do not forgive your brother, it means that your sin remains with you.

Silouan The Athonite

#77. 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

#78. Religious canons, civil laws, are cruel; then what should war be?

William Shakespeare

#79. 51% of the French people - who are not very religious - were thinking that what "Charlie Hebdo" did was unwise. They aren't asking for a law to prevent Charlie Hebdo from publishing caricatures, but they are calling on its editors to be a bit more sensible.

Tariq Ramadan

#80. It is a very rare church indeed that encourages its members to think for themselves in religious matters, or even tolerates this, and in most of them the clergy are quite ready to lay down the law in other fields too.

Anne Roe

#81. As all types and figures in the Law were but empty shadows without the coming of Christ, so the New Testament is but a dead letter without the Holy Spirit in redeemed men as the living power of a full salvation.

William Law

#82. The Constitution had provided that all the public functionaries of the Union ... should be under oath or affirmation for its support. The homage of religious faith was thus superadded to all the obligations of temporal law to give it strength.

John Quincy Adams

#83. Perfection does not consist in any singular state or condition of life, or in any particular set of duties, but in holy and religious conduct of ourselves in every state of Life.

William Law

#84. RITE, n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom, with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.

Ambrose Bierce

#85. The law for religious freedom ... [has]put down the aristocracy of the clergy and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind.

Thomas Jefferson

#86. And how long will your fingers be so tangled in the law that you can't live out of My grace?

Angie Smith

#87. One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.

Adrienne Rich

#88. Law enforcement does counter political extremism here in the United States in the exact same way that they do political extremists who are infiltrated into the United States, who may come from a religious motivation, as we saw overseas in Europe. But the same methodologies have to be used.

Malcolm Wrightson Nance

#89. If God is sovereign, then it is impossible for civil government to be neutral on issues of law. All law is based in some religious code.

Randall Terry

#90. The Law saith, Where is thy righteousness, goodness, and satisfaction? The Gospel saith, Christ is thy righteousness, goodness, and satisfaction.

Patrick Hamilton

#91. I can't imagine why a media company views a law preventing the commission of hate speech as a restriction on media freedom, but it is probably similar to how some religious folk view hate speech as being essential to religious freedom.

Christina Engela

#92. Any law that belittles God is man made.

Auliq Ice

#93. I am well aware that there are prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union, including some who have said they have chosen to resist the law because of religious reasons.

Billy Graham

#94. No terms, no conditions, no promises, no commitment, and no institution - but only another example of what happens when law and politics attempt to regulate a religious institution.

H. Kirk Rainer

#95. The religious instinct will never be replaced by law or even philanthropy.

Hugh Reginald Haweis

#96. From morning to night keep Jesus in thy heart, long for nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing but to have all that is within thee changed into the spirit and temper of the holy Jesus.

William Law

#97. However, the religious extremists, especially the pro-Taliban organizations, they mobilized and instigated the Islamists to come on the streets and put pressure on the government to stop any reform on the blasphemy law.

Shahbaz Bhatti

#98. Your religious book(s) mentioned the power of mind thousands of years ago so WHY do you have to wait until the science proves it in the 21st century? Let others wait to realize/prove the facts not you.

Maddy Malhotra

#99. The law itself exhibits justice and teaches wisdom by abstinence from sensible images and by calling out to the Maker and Father of the universe.

Clement Of Alexandria

#100. Our legal and political culture has created a bias in the law that borders on censorship against reading, displaying, or quoting the Bible.

Ralph E. Reed Jr.