Rick Perry Quotes

Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives.

Freedom of religion has been replaced by freedom from religion.

We have the most religious freedom of any country in the world, including the freedom not to believe.

Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there can not be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.

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

Congress should not establish a religion and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience, or that one sect might obtain a pre-eminence, or two combined together, and establish a religion to which they would compel others to conform

… tolerance is essential to protect one's own religion and one's own deeply held religious beliefs from external manipulation or efforts to overcome them, perhaps from other religions that are pushing in the opposite direction. That is the basic reason for religious tolerance.

A secular state can offer security to Muslims since it is compatible with acknowledging that religion is important and, that in a religiously plural environment the state does not allow believers in one religious tradition to enjoy a privileged status. All are citizens with equal rights.

What does religious freedom look like? As America gets more religiously diverse, the concept is getting harder to define …. You can get 10 different groups in the room and they will disagree about what religious liberty is.

Catholics and Protestants remained faithful to their religions, but stopped thinking of them in zero-sum terms and gradually embraced the separation between church and state.

Freedom of religion does not entitle your religion to have a privileged position within the public sphere.

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

Religious tolerance does not mean one cannot express his own beliefs. It does mean that seeking to undermine or attack the religious faith and beliefs of another has always been a short road to trouble.

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.

The new source of divisiveness is the assault of secularism on religion.

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.

A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb.

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.

Religious liberty, hey, it's about religious liberty. And there has to be a melding of both. We're living in a time where you have to have a melding of both. But it's very unfair what they're doing to religion in this country.

It is hard to convince people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think that religion is a good thing that deserves protection. The challenge for those who want to protect religious liberty in the United States, Europe, and other similar places is to convince people who are not religious that religious liberty is worth special protection.

As a preacher who has spent significant time in churches and houses of worship all across the country, I can tell you firsthand that religious liberty and freedom are principles that can never be infringed upon.

America's freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, offers every wisdom tradition an opportunity to address our soul-deep needs: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, secular humanism, agnosticism and atheism among others.

Whatever America's founders believed about Christianity - and they believed a wide range of things - they clearly rejected the idea of an established church.

I certainly do not support excluding faith from public life.