Fethullah Gulen Quotes

A lot of America's success is because we're an open society and haven't brought dogma or religious influence into the American political process.

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow-men.

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

Religion is too important an aspect of human life to be prostituted to politics, just as politics is too important a part of human life to be enslaved to religion.

I believe in secular politics.

In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.

Islam and democracy can function together.

As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom - not least freedom of conscience.

We can't equate democracy with Christianity because the largest democracy on earth is India, which is primarily Hindu. The third largest democracy is Indonesia, which is Islamic. Democracy and freedom are not dependent on Christian beliefs.

Politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion.

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.

The struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and morality is going on all over the world - including the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly jailed, killed, exiled or merely intimidated and silenced.

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.

No political party can or ought to exist when one of its corner-stones is opposition to freedom of thought and to the right to worship God.

Freedom arises from a multiplicity of sects, which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty.

There is no room for theocracy in Islam.

The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence; whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians. Test Oaths and established creeds should be avoided as the worst of evils.

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

We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government

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

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

Religious freedom in the American sense, incorporating the separation of church and state, has been the pivotal concept of the national development of the United States of America.

The Englishman has gone, but our liberty has not come. For us the so called liberty is simply a change of masters, black for white. Under the garb of democracy and secularism our Panth, our liberty and our religion are being crushed.

Liberty—liberty within the law—and civilization are inseparable.

The freedom of religion and of religious conscience is at the core of democratic development.