Florence King Quotes

I’d like to see us re-institute school prayer so that our young children have some moral beliefs, they have some principles

Perhaps there was a correlation between taking prayer and Bible study out of schools, and what has happened in our society.

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

We should not permit prayer to be taken out of the schools; that's the only way most of us got through.

At the last meeting of the Board of Education, Mr. Maegher called attention to the chanting of the Lord's Prayer in the public schools, which is a violation of a rule which forbids the introduction of religious matters. We are glad this subject has come up at last. The Lord's Prayer has been brought into disrespect about long enough by being snarled through the dirty noses of a hundred bad boys and preposterous girls.

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.

From America's schools, religion has been relentlessly purged. No prayers, no Bibles, no Christian symbols, no Ten Commandments.

I'm all for teaching creation and allowing prayers in schools, as soon as scholars begin teaching Darwinism and geometry in church.

I know that some believe that voluntary prayer in schools should be restricted to a moment of silence. We already have the right to remain silent - we can take our Fifth Amendment.

Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that would be eliminated from schools, too?

It appears that the Soviets are now going to allow prayer in school. One wonders how soon the United States will catch up.

Since the Court took God our of our schools, we've gotten exactly what we should expect: godless schools.

If prayer is to leave the public schools, let the ridicule of prayer leave also.

We seek a constitutional amendment to permit voluntary school prayer. God should never have been expelled from America's classrooms in the first place.

Once involved in the school-prayer fight, I rapidly became aware of, and appalled by, the political and economic power of the Church in America -all based on the violation of one of our nation's canon laws: the separation of church and state.

It wasn't the Supreme Court that expelled God from our public school classrooms. It was the textbook publishers.

I don't believe in school prayer. I think it's total nonsense...who is the teacher there that is going to have them pray? And is the teacher going to be Catholic or Mormon or Episcopalian or what? It just causes all sorts of problems. And what are the kids praying about anyway? Does it really matter, does praying in school...what are you doing it for? The whole thing just opens up all sorts of elements of discussion. I think it's crazy.

People for the American Way says it has yet to find anyone who has made a stronger case against the proposed school prayer Constitutional amendment... What kind of prayer would we use?

School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.

We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?

We know that if religion is allowed into schools, pupils will sometimes begin to question the teaching they receive.

If Congress wants to get involved in the business of morality by allowing a moment of silence in our schools, I support that. But if our representatives in Washington are truly going to be moral leaders, then they have to do more than just tell us to pray for guidance.

My son Bill, who came to me in 1960-he was 14 then, quoted the old parable to me: "It is not by their words, but by their deeds that ye shall know them" -pointing out that if I was a true atheist, I would not permit the public schools of America to force him to read the Bible and say prayers against his will. He was right.

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . We need believing people.

Right now religion has the romantic aura of the forbidden - Christ is cool. We need to bring it into the schools, which kids already hate, and associate it firmly with boredom, regulation, condescension, makework and de facto segregation ... Prayer in the schools will rid us of the bland no-offense ecumenism that is so infuriating to us anticlericals: Oh, so now you say Jews didn't kill Christ - a little on the late side, isn't it?