Joseph Smith Jr. Quotes

America is a country founded on religious freedom and liberty.

The power that can invade the liberty of conscience can usurp civil liberty; and where there is a power that can usurp civil liberty, there is no commonwealth.

Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion over other religions, or a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others. However, today, as in the past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws. We now see “religious liberty” arguments sneaking their way back into our political and constitutional discourse (just like the concept of “state rights”) in an effort to undermine the rights of some Americans.

If a man wishes to have God recognized in the constitution of our country, let him read the history of the Inquisition, and let him remember that hundreds of millions of men, women, and children have been sacrificed to placate the wrath, or win the approbation of this god.

I am the greatest advocate of the Constitution of the United States there is on the earth. In my feelings I am always ready to die for the protection of the weak and oppressed in their just rights. The only fault I find with the Constitution is, it is not broad enough to cover the whole ground.

Your constitution guarantees to every citizen, even the humblest, the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. It promises to all, religious freedom, the right to all to worship God beneath their own vine and fig tree, according to the dictates of their conscience. It guarantees to all the citizens of the several states the right to become citizens of any one of the states, and to enjoy all the rights and immunities of the citizens of the state of his adoption.

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right.

Is it not amazing that at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country, above all others, fond of liberty-that in such an age and in such a country we find men professing a religion the most humane, mild, gentle and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible, and destructive to liberty?

We see our liberties curtailed more and more and more.We see a tremendous attack on religious freedom.

The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery

The United States of America stands for: the ability for people to worship freely, the ability for people to vote and to express their opinion freely is something we hold dear.

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

A lot of prophets have gone to jail.

While the struggle for religious liberty had proceeded without large-scale bloodshed in New England and elsewhere in the United States, the struggle for political liberty had not fared so well.

I cannot reconcile monitoring certain people for no reason other than their religion with the freedom of religion we have here in America.

President Obama understands that, as a nation founded by those who fled religious persecution, freedom of religion is central to who we are as Americans. Our rights are not given to us by government, they are endowed by our Creator.

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

Religious freedom is already protected in the United States. It's in our Constitution. It's in most state constitutions.

Americans take justifiable pride in the freedoms given to them by nature or God and enshrined in the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

Government, which does not and did not grant us our rights, must not now seek to deny them by using fear as its justification.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

Religious freedom, often referred to as the first freedom, is of central import to the American experiment. As such it should feature prominently in U.S. foreign policy.

I feel that at any of our rights can be taken away at any moment.

Freedom of the press and of religious opinion should be inviolate.

The United States is a country of freedom that looks primarily after the rights of all of its citizens, of all religions and races, despite the problems in application that manifest themselves from time to time.