Separation Of State Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Having a member who serves in the Government and who also belongs to the structures of the party does not retard this particular objective the separation of party and state. It does not.

Jacob Zuma

#9. Holiness is not merely a feeling, state of mind, or good intention. It involves practical separation from sin and real separation unto God.

Paul Washer

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Separation of church and state' meant freedom to worship, not freedom from worship.

Larry Schweikart

#13. 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

#14. US is a very religious country. Separation of church and state is part of our credo, but that it is hard to understand since our money says "In God we trust" and every President says "God bless America".

Madeleine Albright

#15. 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

#16. [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

#17. It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.

Samuel Johnson

#18. The modern concept of separation is an argument for a total separation of religion from the state. The consequence of the acceptance of the doctrine leads to the removal of religion as an influence in civil government.

Francis Schaeffer

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

Thomas Paine

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. When you go beyond awareness, there is a state of nonduality, in which there is no cognition, only pure being. In the state of nonduality, all separation ceases.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. If it were possible to meet the Beloved while laughing and in a state of comfort, why should one suffer the anguish of separation?

Kabir

#26. If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be one nation gone under.

Ronald Reagan

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. There is no such thing as 'separation of church and state.' Reporters continue to promote this fallacy and scare Christians out of standing up for their beliefs.

Ken Ham

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

Sharron Angle

#33. 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

#34. 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

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

George Washington

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. There are checks and balances and broad separation of powers under the Constitution. Each organ of the State, i.e. the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, must have respect for the others and not encroach into each other's domain.

P. Sathasivam

#40. 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

#41. The very idea that you could have separation between mosque and state from Islam's perspective is the imposition on them of Christian practice. Islam doesn't really have a place for state. They are a universalistic faith like Christianity, but they think there is no country that bounds Islam.

Stanley Hauerwas

#42. Love is the state of enlightenment and enlightenment is the state of love. You can't make any separation between them. Enlightenment is the state of no feelings and pure knowledge and so is love.

Barry Long

#43. But separation of church and state was never meant to separate God and government.

Roy Moore

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

David Barton

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

Michael Badnarik

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. America wasn't founded as a theocracy. America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn't bloody and barbaric. That's why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

Gregory A. Boyd

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Because all existence is founded upon the ever-present state of union, everything already exists in a state of tranquility. However, this state of tranquility is masked from us by our assumption that there is a separation, that there is a problem.

Shunryu Suzuki

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. Quite often you hear people say, 'What about separation of church and state?' There is no such thing.

Dan Severson

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Christopher Hitchens

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. The state of love is the state of grace. The development of that state and the unlocking of its mysteries brings one to the condition where there is no separation between oneself and others

Nilakanta Sri Ram

#67. There should be absolutely no 'Separation of Church and State' in America.

David Barton

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation.

John F. Kennedy

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

W. A. Criswell

#76. A truly free society protects all faiths, and true faith protects a free society.

Rick Warren

#77. 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

#78. Anybody that believes in separation of church and state needs to leave right now.

Star Parker

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. Among the most urgent political priorities of our age is the separation of economy and state.

Llewellyn Rockwell

#83. 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

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

Robert A. Heinlein

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. Thousands of climate scientists agree that global warming is not only the most threatening environmental problem but also one of the greatest challenges facing all of humanity. We must demand a separation between oil and state. We can get off oil and slow global warming.

Leonardo DiCaprio

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. When Pat Robertson says there is no constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state, I say he is wrong.

Arlen Specter

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

Sean Hannity

#98. 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

#99. Unity consciousness is a state of enlightenment where we pierce the mask of illusion which creates separation and fragmentation. Behind the appearance of separation is one unified field of wholeness. Here the seer and the scenery are one.

Deepak Chopra

#100. 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