Browsing Topic Best Our Founding Fathers Quotes

If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

For my part, I sincerely esteem the Constitution, a system which without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests.

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works … I mean real good works … not holy day keeping, sermon-hearing … or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.

Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we render him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.

It is our boast, that a man’s religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws.

We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In this enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man’s religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States.

I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.

[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.

The only foundation for . . . a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.

Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths . . . ?

To disarm the people… was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.

I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiment in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated.

Congress has no power to make any religious establishments.

I believe … that the soul of man is immortal and will be treated with justice in another life, respecting its conduct in this.

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men.

I looked around for God’s judgments, but saw no signs of them.

The Christian Constitutional Society, its object is first: The support of the Christian religion. Second: The support of the United States.

Energy and persistence conquer all things.

Without Virtue there can be no liberty

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Every child in America who enters school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with an allegiance toward our elected officials, toward our founding fathers, toward our institutions, toward the preservation of this form of government that we have. Patriotism, nationalism, and sovereignty, all that proves that children are sick because a truly well individual is one who has rejected all of those things, and is truly the international child of the future.