John Ashcroft Quotes

Growing up in D.C. there are so many different types of educational and professional levels. They call D.C. 'Chocolate City' but just because we're all chocolate doesn't mean we're all the same. In D.C., everyone co-exists harmoniously but the lines are still drawn. And people don't really step over those lines.

It is its hostility and belligerence towards non-Muslims that makes Islamism a global problem. It should be noted that Muslims have not always treated non-Muslims in this manner. If we review Islam's 1400-year history we find ample examples of periods in which non-Muslims were treated with tolerance, as well as times of hatred and persecution.

We persecute nobody for religion. We regard religion as an error and fight it with education.

There's got to be a zero tolerance to racism, anti-Semitism, any form of division and intolerance.

It takes an awful lot to get me cross.

I'm against exclusion of any kind - whether that's restricting people from Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. or kicking merchants off our platform if they're operating within the law.

I hate when pastors have a gay son and then they become pro-gay.

[The founding fathers] believed that freedom of expression included religious views and beliefs, so long as the government did not force people to worship in a particular matter and remain neutral on what those views and beliefs were.

We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group and one of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people.

To suggest that a person's strongly held religious view is less tolerant than a strongly held antireligious view is morally, intellectually, and politically inconsistent and incorrect.

I would not be standing here today if my skin were white or my religion were Presbyterian. I am here today only because my skin is yellow and my religion is Unification Church. The ugliest things in this beautiful country of America are religious bigotry and racism.

Eternal vigilance must be maintained to guard against those who seek to stifle ideas, establish a narrow orthodoxy, and divide our nation along arbitrary lines of race, ethnicity, and religious belief or non-belief.

You deny that man is really so prejudiced as I suppose him; talk to him then of some foreign country, ask him what religion he is of.

Never bend over for a Christian.

I lived in a plenty tough neighborhood. When somebody called me a 'dirty little Guinea', there was only one thing to do-break his head. When I got older, I realized that you shouldn't do it that way. I realized that you've got to do it through education. Children are not to blame. It is the parents. How can a child know whether his playmate is an Italian, a Jew or Irish, unless the parents have discussed it in the privacy of their homes.

Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

Faced with intolerance and hatred, no debate is possible.

What shall we do with...the Jews?...their homes also should be razed and destroyed.

There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.

There can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law-system as a prelude to a new intolerance... Every law-system must maintain its existence by hostility to every other law-system and to alien religious foundations or else it commits suicide

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

Antisemitism is just another form of racism. It's the same sickness, whether it's about Christians, about Islamophobia, which is horrible. It's all wrong. It's all the same.

What shall we do with...the Jews?...I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings...are to be taken from them.

I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man's heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.

Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives.