Quotes on Religious Liberty

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle.

The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still.

..the establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive that induced me to the field of battle.

Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.

It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people... it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

The legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Because we hold it for 'a fundamental and undeniable truth', that religion or 'the duty which we owe to our Creator' and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.

Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.

There is not a truth to be gathered from history more certain, or more momentous, than this: that civil liberty cannot long be separated from religious liberty without danger, and ultimately without destruction to both. Wherever religious liberty exists, it will, first or last, bring in and establish political liberty.

Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.

I believe that the most essential element of our defense of freedom is our insistence on speaking out for the cause of religious liberty.

Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect.