Margaret Mead Quotes

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

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.

Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion.

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.

Atheists have just as much of a right to the public discourse as any ... people of any religious faith in this country.

America is a country founded on religious freedom and liberty.

A just laicism allows religious freedom. The state does not impose religion but rather gives space to religions with a responsibility toward civil society, and therefore it allows these religions to be factors in building up society.

Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own particular way, you could protect intellectual freedom, and religion would flourish.

No religious consensus is possible in the United States, and to impose one would be both unconstitutional and unjust.

Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.

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

All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All separated from government, are compatible with liberty.

The United States is a country of no distinct religious denomination, but one of perfect freedom, and of a vast variety of religious opinions; one whose inhabitants have solemnly interdicted to its government any interference, direct or indirect, with the subject of their religion.

Freedom arises from a multiplicity of sects, which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty.

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.

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.

Religion is for God, and the country is for everyone.

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

Sometimes I think the environment in which we operate is entirely too secular. The fact that we have freedom of religion doesn't mean we need to try to have freedom from religion

The decision for complete religious freedom and for separation of church and state in the eyes of the rest of the world was perhaps the most important decision reached in the New World. Everywhere in the western world of the 18th century, church and state were one; and everywhere the state maintained an established church and tried to force conformity to its dogma.

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.

Freedom of religion has been replaced by freedom from religion.

America was founded by religious people; devout people who came here because they wanted freedom of religion, It's what made America different from every other country.

There is not a truth to be gathered from history more certain, or more momentous, than this: that civil liberty cannot long be separated from religious liberty without danger, and ultimately without destruction to both. Wherever religious liberty exists, it will, first or last, bring in and establish political liberty.

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.