Ronald Reagan Quotes

I don't have freedom in the United States to go into a public school and preach the Gospel, nor is a student free in a public school to pray, or a teacher free to read the Bible publicly to the students. At the same time, we have a great degree of freedom for which I am grateful.

A school prayer amendment would confer upon public school boards a power the 1st Amendment now denies to Congress and the states, that is, the power to establish religion.

To those who cite the first amendment as reason for excluding God from more and more of our institutions and everyday life, may I just say: The first amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny.

In 1962, the Supreme Court banned organized prayer from public schools. Since then, federal, state, and local courts and officials, including public school administrators, have joined in a nationwide search and destroy mission for student religious practices.

The point is that knowledge of God is not prohibited under the First Amendment.

We have taken God out of our education system. We have taken Him out of government. You have lawyers that sue you every time you mention the name of Jesus Christ in any public forum.

The First Amendment to the Constitution reflects that concept recognized in the Ten Commandments, that the duties we owe to God and the manner of discharging those duties are outside the purview of government.

It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.

The framers of our Constitution meant we were to have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

Private religious speech can't be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech.

The courts are using the First Amendment to attack religion, when they should be using it to protect religion.

The phrase 'religious liberty' has become an overused talisman. Most of the invocations lately have nothing to do with actual infringements of free exercise [of religion]. They're about political and cultural dissent from gay rights.

Government has no more right to help us Christians flaunt our beliefs than it has to suppress any faith.

If a State refused to let religious groups use facilities open to others, then it would demonstrate not neutrality but hostility toward religion.

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

The intensive and concerted effort to exclude references to religion or God from public places is an attack on our founding principles. It's an attempt to bolster a growing reliance on the government--especially the judiciary--as the source of our rights. But if our rights are not unalienable, if they don't come from a source higher than ourselves, then they're malleable at the will of the state. This is a prescription for tyranny.

When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they sought to protect churches from government interference. They never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself.

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right.

The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.

Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect.

On the issues of religious liberty, the Supreme Court continues to scrape against the bedrock of the American spirit.

Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.

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

The First Amendment exists to protect our religious liberty--to ensure that all Americans are able to seek out worship God with all our hearts, free from government coercion; it does not mandate scouring the public square to forcibly remove all acknowledgement s of the Almighty

The ACLU sees the separation of church and state as so absolute that not a single religious word must be allowed to pass a schoolhouse door.