"A man should have a right to be religious if he wants to. The government should not be involved in those decisions."
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Religious quotes
Religious
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Religious quotes (page 38 of 358)
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"Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution."
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"There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse."
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"When holy and devout religious men are at their beads, 'tis hard to draw them thence; so sweet is zealous contemplation."
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"I believe in religion against the religious; in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer."
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"The Jews have always been waiting for a Messiah, but their Messiah is for them only, not for us, a Messiah ho will give them mastery over the Christians."
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"The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words: 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our enquiries must end."
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"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."
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"We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries."
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"I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises."
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"The legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions."
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"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems."
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"Education ought everywhere to be religious education. At the same time, parents are farther bound to employ no instructors who will not educate their children religiously. To commit our children to the care of irreligious persons, is to commit lambs to the superintendency of wolves."
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"Everyone worships something. The only choice you get is what to worship."
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"Mercy and forgiveness must be free and unmerited to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer has to do something to merit it, then it isn’t mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness."
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"You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological."
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"The first sign of your becoming religious is that you are becoming cheerful"
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"Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic, to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a simplistic litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings?"
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"The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said: "My Companions are as stars. Whomsoever of them you follow, you will be rightly guided." When a man looks at a star, and finds his way by it, the star does not speak any word to that man. Yet, by merely looking at the star, the man knows the road from roadlessness and reaches his goal."
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"It was then that my religious consciousness emerged to flower years afterward into definite forms of religious dancing in which there is no sense of division between spirit and flesh, religion and art."
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