Cokie Roberts Quotes

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers.

Instead of school busing and prayer in schools, which are both controversial, why not a joint solution? Prayer in buses. Just drive these kids around all day and let them pray their fuckn' empty little heads off.

I'm for prayer in schools.

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

The right to engage in voluntary prayer or religious discussion free from discrimination does not include the right to have a captive audience listen or to compel other students to participate.

This was not a real issue. It was invented to promote the ideology [creationism] of the people on the school. This ideology has no place in modern education.

We shall take the Scopes case to the United States Supreme Court if necessary to establish that a teacher may tell the truth without being thrown in jail.

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

From you we have learned what we, at least, value, to separate Church and State; and from you we gather inspiration at all times in our devotion to learning, to religious liberty, and to individual and National freedom.

The forefathers of the United States were children of religious bigotry and persecution, and, as a result, fled Britain to create a new approach to life and government. They valued intellect and education. In fact, they outlined the principles of the United States' democracy to establish intellectual freedom from the Church.

In America our public schools are intended to be religiously neutral. Our teachers and schools are neither to endorse nor to inhibit religion. I believe this is a very good thing.

In America we don’t apologize for opinions, that’s why we have a 1st Amendment. If we can’t discuss even controversial opinions in the pages of our newspapers, where are we going to do it?

The public schools belong to all Americans. As guardians of our constitutional principles, teachers and administrators have a special obligation and responsibility to protect the religious liberty rights of students of all faiths and none, and to ensure that religion and religious conviction are treated with fairness and respect…

The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free—which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.

The Supreme Court has continually been zealous in protecting the right of school children to be free from sectarian influence by school authorities. Thus, practices which may be acceptable for an adult audience or a public forum may be unacceptable for public schools where attendance is mandatory and the desire to conform is typical among youth of such age.

Has America become a country where classroom discussion of the Ten Commandments is impermissible, but teacher instructions in safe sodomy are to be mandatory?

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.

I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights ... at the school house door.

Unbelievers in this country have rights but they don’t have the right to veto everybody else.

Academic freedom carries with it the right to heresy as well as the right to restate and defend the traditional views.

Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.

Religious and civil liberty are best protected by unbounded freedom of thought.

Ours is the only government under heaven where liberty can, in truth, be said to dwell; and the numberless advantages of such a government, for moral, religious, and intellectual improvement, may be learnt from the prosperous state of our country since the time she assumed her just and proper station among the nations of the earth.

The state may not require that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma