Ezra Taft Benson Quotes

What other nations call religious toleration, we call religious rights.

In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.

Pat, did you notice yesterday the ACLU, and all the Christ-haters, People For the American Way, NOW, etc. were totally disregarded by the Democrats and the Republicans in both houses of Congress as they went out on the steps and called out on to God in prayer and sang "God Bless America" and said "let the ACLU be hanged"? In other words, when the nation is on its knees, the only normal and natural and spiritual thing to do is what we ought to be doing all the time - calling upon God.

If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn.

The First Amendment freedom of religion is as important today as when the Bill of Rights was first written.

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.

Freedom of the press and of religious opinion should be inviolate.

There is little doubt that religious liberty is best exercised within the setting of the secular state.

Zealous groups threaten to infringe civil liberties when they seek government support to impose their own religious views on non-adherents. This has taken many forms, including attempts to introduce organized prayer in public schools, to outlaw birth control and abortion, and to use public tax revenues to finance religious schools.

We want a separation of church and state, but we also want the human and civil rights of all people. Religion is a human right.

Unbelievers in this country have rights but they don’t have the right to veto everybody else.

Religious freedom must include the right to influence public policy within the bounds of liberal norms.

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than on opinions in physics or geometry.

With us, the State is undoubtedly on solid ground in refusing to decide what type of religion is best for society. Society is left free to work out the problem. And here is a curious and pertinent matter for remark: that the Stale is the only department of civilization which, by common consent, is denied this privilege.

Roger Williams... successfully vindicated the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, and effected a moral and political revolution in all governments of the civilized world.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion over other religions, or a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others. However, today, as in the past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws. We now see “religious liberty” arguments sneaking their way back into our political and constitutional discourse (just like the concept of “state rights”) in an effort to undermine the rights of some Americans.

Nothing is more important to me, and nothing was more important to our founding fathers, than freedom of religion.

Churchmen are quick to defend religious freedom; lawyers were never so universally aroused as by President Roosevelt's Court bill; newspapers are most alert to civil liberties when there is a hint of press censorship in the air. And educators become perturbed at every effort to curb academic freedom. But too seldom do all of these become militant when ostensibly the rights of only one group are threatened. They do not always react to the truism that when the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes.

I consider it my duty to acknowledge God. To take down the Ten Commandments and to stop holding prayer would be a violation of that duty. I will not take down the Ten Commandments and I will not stop holding prayer.

Remember civil and religious liberty always go together: if the foundation of the one be sapped, the other will fall of course.

[I]t is impossible that any people of government should ever prosper, where men render not unto God, that which is God's, as well as to Caesar, that which is Caesar's.

[Liberty] considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.

In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.

The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted.