William Bennett Quotes

The Founders believed that pluralism survived only within the concept of religious liberty espoused by American Christianity.

When I signed the Declaration of Independence I had in view not only our independence from England but the toleration of all sects.

I want to say to you is that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson did not intend to drive a stake in the heart of religion and to drive it out of our public life. What they intended to do was to set up a system so that we could bring religion into our public life and into our private life without any of us telling the other what to do.

It is evident from their writings that the Founding Fathers would never have tolerated the separation that we have embraced today. They knew that religious principles provided morality and self-control - the lifeblood for the survival of any self-governing community.

The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.

Religion and the public liberty of a people are interwoven, and cannot exist separately.

The great leaders of the American Revolution were determined to remove political support from every religious establishment.

Nothing is more important to me, and nothing was more important to our founding fathers, than freedom of religion.

We must never forget that this coutry was founded by men who came to these shores to worship God as they pleased. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, all came here for this great purpose. They did not come here to do as they pleased - but to worship God as they pleased, and that is an important distinction.

The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted.

America was founded by religious people; devout people who came here because they wanted freedom of religion, It's what made America different from every other country.

Freedom is won by relegating religion to a purely private sphere remote from the body politic. In fact, the establishment of a free society is predicated on the idea that religion must be surgically removed from culture.

America didn't create religious liberty. Religious liberty created America.

In the experiences of a year of the Presidency, there has come to me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious intolerance which exists among many of our citizens. I hold it to be a menace to the very liberties we boast and cherish.

Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France, I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.

The United States of America was formed to honor the word of God.

The Pledge of Allegiance reflects the truth that faith in God has played a significant role in America since the days of the founding of our country.

Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own particular way, you could protect intellectual freedom, and religion would flourish.

Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.

Of the six men who have done most to make America the wonder and the joy she is to all of us, not one could be the citizen of a government so constituted; for Washington and Franklin and Jefferson, certainly the three mightiest leaders in our early history, were heretics in their day, Deists, as men called them; and Garrison and Lincoln and Sumner, certainly the three mightiest in these later times, would all be disfranchised by the proposed amendment. Lincoln could not have taken the oath of office had such a clause been in the Constitution.

Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty.

Thomas Jefferson rode his horse around the 13 Colonies to try to keep us from having a national religion. Mixing religion and politics doesn’t work.

There is no room for theocracy in Islam.

Congress shall not make any law infringing the rights of conscience, or establishing any religious sect or society Congress shall make no law establishing one religious sect or society in preference to others. Congress shall make no law establishing any particular denomination of religion in preference to another

Religious freedom must include the right to influence public policy within the bounds of liberal norms.