Benjamin Rush Quotes

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.

The only foundation for . . . a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.

Our Ancestors founded their government on morality and religious sentiment. They were brought hither by their high veneration of the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate it with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influences through all their institutions, civil, political, social, and educational.

Religion is the only solid Base of morals and that Morals are the only possible Support of free governments.

If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? ...Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

I had a very moral upbringing, and spiritual in a sort of not very specific way.

The Ten Commandments have never been replaced as the moral basis upon which society rests.

Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework - and enforcing it - we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion.

The profound influence of religion on American politics is vital, but it is best when indirect: on the morals, habits, and souls of individual Americans; on the political climate and the principals that should guide policy, rather than on specific policies themselves…

Our government makes no sense, unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is.

Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.

The strength of a country is the strength of its religious convictions.

Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.

[I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.

If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.

That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.

Religion is the mortar that binds society together; the granite pedestal of liberty; the strong backbone of the social system.

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.

Knowledge is truthful only if it’s based in morality.

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.

There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.

Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.