State Religion Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion It is an atheist, nihilistic religion - but it is a religion that is obligatory for all.

Rocco Buttiglione

#5. We are a religious nation because we do not have a state religion, because the government guarantees freedom of religion but has no role in religion, because not only do we tolerate our religious differences, we celebrate them.

Geraldine Ferraro

#6. 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

#7. Religion cannot sink lower than when somehow it is raised to a state religion ... It becomes then an avowed mistress.

Heinrich Heine

#8. America's state religion, is patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many of the citizenry that 'treason' is morally worse than murder or rape.

William Blum

#9. Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

Ambrose Bierce

#10. Our United States "State religion" has become Secular Humanism which has no "separation from the State.

James C. Campbell

#11. 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

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

W. A. Criswell

#13. 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

#14. Liberals want the family destroyed, they want religion destroned, because then you have loyalty directly to the state.

Ann Coulter

#15. You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the state.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Tom C. Clark

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Walter Jon Williams

#26. 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

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

Roger Williams

#28. How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares 'God wills it thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#29. 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

#30. The net effect of the distortion of the First Amendment is to require that wherever the state is, religion must be excluded.

Pat Swindall

#31. Religion becomes a state of mind achievable in almost any activity of life, if this activity is raised to a suitable level of perfection.

Abraham Maslow

#32. 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

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

Eugene H. Peterson

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

Christopher Hitchens

#35. Emotion is not simply an overplus of feeling; it is life lived at white-heat, a state of wonder. To lose wonder is to lose the true element of religion.

Oswald Chambers

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. I believe that religion should be totally separated from the state. That's not the way it is today, not even in Sweden.

Bjorn Ulvaeus

#39. Fanaticism is not a state of religion but a state of mind.

Tony Blair

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. As long as this belief, 'I am the doer' is not gone, one has not yet attained an iota of exact religion. He is still in the auspicious-inauspicious [shubh-ashubh] state.

Dada Bhagwan

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. Let us awake to a sense of the perilous state of many professing Christians. 'Without holiness no man shall see the Lord'; without sanctification there is no salvation (Hebrews 12:14). Then what an enormous amount of so-called religion there is which is perfectly useless!

J.C. Ryle

#48. History's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component

Mark Kurlansky

#49. Not the Christian religion only, but nature herself, cries out against the state of slavery.

Pope Leo X

#50. Liberty of conscience is for those who truly fear the Lord. A fundamental task of the state is the establishment of pure religion.

John Cotton

#51. 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

#52. But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?

Harriet Martineau

#53. Spirituality is to Religion, what Love is to Marriage. Spirituality is an emotional state of the mind, just like Love, while Religion on the other hand, is a social construct, quite like Marriage.

Abhijit Naskar

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. Parents have no right to impose their religion on their children ... A Fundamentalist Protestant parent has no right to expect the state to support his own narrow conception of education.

Paul Kurtz

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. But if we say that labels have any meaning, when we talk about the nature of a philosophy or a religion, we must describe it according to its recognized ideal state, not according to how some people may be imperfectly practicing it.

Alexander Pierce

#69. The plain fact is religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key deciscions made by religious people. By irrationalists. By those who would steer the ship of state, not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.

Bill Maher

#70. 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

#71. We Neuroscientists have come a long way in proving that God is neither a Delusion nor an Almighty Being watching over life on Earth. God is the Event Horizon of Human Consciousness. I termed this state of attaining God, as 'Absolute Unity Qualia'.

Abhijit Naskar

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. The state is a bankrupt institution. The only alternative to this bankrupt 'humanistic' system is a God-centered government.

R.J. Rushdoony

#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. If Jehovah cannot support his religion without going into partnership with a State Legislature, I think he ought to give it up.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#82. Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God. ... Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.

Seraphim Rose

#83. 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

#84. Heresy no longer existed within religion; it
was founded in the state.

Reinhart Koselleck

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. I was raised Catholic. Guilt is my resting state.

Paul Doiron

#89. 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

#90. The world is not religious because religion is imposed upon us. The parents are in a hurry to impose; the church, the state, the country - everybody is in a hurry to impose a certain religion on the child. How foolish! How stupid! Religion needs maturity, great understanding, before one can choose.

Rajneesh

#91. 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

#92. But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No two, say I, have established the same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of establishments?

Thomas Jefferson

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

Camille Paglia

#94. The state, frankly, could care less. Historically, the state has been able to use any religious point of view for its own ends ... The examples of government misusing religion are endless.

Peter McWilliams

#95. 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

#96. There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality.

Jeremy Bentham

#97. Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.

Henrik Ibsen

#98. Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god.

Stefan Molyneux

#99. There are several reasons why Russians view the oppressive state positively. First, in the Russian Orthodox religion, there is an understanding of authority as something sent by God.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#100. 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