Barack Obama Quotes

All good moral philosophy is ... but the handmaid to religion.

Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

Morality has nothing in common with politics.

I consider ethics, as well as religion, as supplements to law in the government of man.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.

I think we have to give religion its due. I think we have to respect those for whom religion is important, but equally respect those who can achieve good morality without religion.

He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.

Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics'; such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.

Religion to be true must satisfy what may be termed humanitarian economics, that is, where the income and the expenditure balance each other.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.

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

Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity.

There was no other God, religion, or lawful magistracy, than conscience, which teaches all men the precepts of Justice, to do no injury, to live honestly, and give everyone his due.

Irrespective of whether we are believers or agnostics, whether we believe in God or karma, moral ethics is a code which everyone is able to pursue.

Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.

Economics and ethics have little in common.

For most men the love of justice is only the fear of suffering injustice.

No one will dare maintain that it is better to do injustice than to bear it.

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.

All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

All political debates, from tax policy to abortion, draw on moral arguments that rest on religious premises.

I think for those of us who think that our morality is something that needs to be in touch with our religious faith personally, then it's really important to explain that no one party has a monopoly on faith.