Sam Ervin Quotes

I don't have freedom in the United States to go into a public school and preach the Gospel, nor is a student free in a public school to pray, or a teacher free to read the Bible publicly to the students. At the same time, we have a great degree of freedom for which I am grateful.

Religious observances should never be held in a public school or introduced into the public school as part of its program.

In 1962, the Supreme Court banned organized prayer from public schools. Since then, federal, state, and local courts and officials, including public school administrators, have joined in a nationwide search and destroy mission for student religious practices.

I'm for prayer in schools.

The First Amendment freedom of religion is as important today as when the Bill of Rights was first written.

With that in mind and in celebration of National Prayer Day, today I have proposed in the House of Representatives a Constitutional Amendment that would restore voluntary prayer in our Nation's schools.

The point is that knowledge of God is not prohibited under the First Amendment.

I'll tell you right now. I'm for prayer in school.

The framers of our Constitution meant we were to have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

The courts are using the First Amendment to attack religion, when they should be using it to protect religion.

Zealous groups threaten to infringe civil liberties when they seek government support to impose their own religious views on non-adherents. This has taken many forms, including attempts to introduce organized prayer in public schools, to outlaw birth control and abortion, and to use public tax revenues to finance religious schools.

The Congress should at once submit an amendment to the Constitution which enables the right to religious devotion in all governmental agencies—national, state or local.

The passage of the 1st Amendment is the single most dramatic and significant turning point of a revolutionary transition to religious freedom.

If prayer is to leave the public schools, let the ridicule of prayer leave also.

We seek a constitutional amendment to permit voluntary school prayer. God should never have been expelled from America's classrooms in the first place.

People for the American Way says it has yet to find anyone who has made a stronger case against the proposed school prayer Constitutional amendment... What kind of prayer would we use?

The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people from religion; that amendment was written to protect religion from government tyranny. . . But now we're told our children have no right to pray in school. Nonsense. The pendulum has swung too far toward intolerance against genuine religious freedom. It is time to redress the balance.

From a constitutional standpoint, the religion of a candidate is supposed to make no difference. Even before the founding fathers dreamed up the First Amendment, they inserted a provision in the Constitution expressly prohibiting any religious test for office.

The First Amendment to the Constitution reflects that concept recognized in the Ten Commandments, that the duties we owe to God and the manner of discharging those duties are outside the purview of government.

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.

I believe that freedom of speech and freedom of religion go hand-in-hand in America.

We should not permit prayer to be taken out of the schools; that's the only way most of us got through.

Private religious speech can't be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech.

Neither the wording of the amendment itself nor common practice challenged the widely held belief that government guaranteed freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

The phrase 'religious liberty' has become an overused talisman. Most of the invocations lately have nothing to do with actual infringements of free exercise [of religion]. They're about political and cultural dissent from gay rights.