Religion

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
        --John Adams

"Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not only of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all governments and in all the combinations of human society."
        --John Adams

"Statesmen...may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which Freedom can securely stand."
        --John Adams

"And may that Being who is supreme over all, the Patron of Order, the Fountain of Justice, and the Protector in all ages of the world of virtuous liberty, continue His blessing upon this nation and its Government and give it all possible success and duration consistent with the ends of His providence."
        --John Adams, Inaugural Address, 1797

"Government schools are a microcosm of our society. We have erected a wall of separation of God from His children and cleared the way for an unimpeded assault on the traditional standards of decency that stand between degenerates and what they want to do and be. ... We have declared God persona non grata at our peril."
        --Linda Bowles

"If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments."
        --G. K. Chesterton

"Our doctrine of equality and liberty and humanity comes from our belief in the brotherhood of man through the fatherhood of God."
        --Calvin Coolidge

"The higher state to which [America] seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God."
        --Calvin Coolidge, Inaugural Address, 1925

"Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality -- that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."
        --Will and Ariel Durant

"Being a lover of freedom, when the [Nazi] revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks.... Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."
        --Albert Einstein

"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. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? ....
     I therefore beg leave to move -- that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service."
        --Benjamin Franklin, address to Continental Congress 06/18/1787

"Using the force of law to teach children that religion must be kept private is at least as much an establishment of religion as seeming to approve of student prayer."
        --Maggie Gallagher

"Too many Christians are no longer fishers of men but keepers of the aquarium."
        --Paul Harvey

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here."
        --Patrick Henry

"The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate. It is immutable. And if the moral order does not change, then it imposes on us obligations toward God and man. Duty, then, requires the willingness to accept responsibility and to sacrifice one's desires to a higher law."
        --Patrick Henry

"God, give us men! A time like this demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue and damn
His treacherous flatteries without winking!
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog
In public duty and in private thinking."
        --Josiah Gilbert Holland

"[C]an the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever ..."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."
        --Abraham Lincoln

"It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time."
        --Abraham Lincoln

"When I left Springfield [to become President] I asked the people to pray for me. I was not a Christian. When I buried my son, the severest trial of my life, I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ."
        --Abraham Lincoln

"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."
        --James Madison

"The belief in a God All Powerful, wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources."
        --James Madison

"The twentieth century provides little or no evidence in any corner of the globe to support the contention that religion causes most human conflict."
        --Michael Medved

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"
        --Inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial, Washington D.C.

"Rather than an excess of firearms there's a shortage of faith and family that has a lot more to do with what happened out in Littleton. Let's face it, our public square is more hostile to religion than it is to Marilyn Manson."
        --Kate O'Beirne

"It would be a sad thing if the religious and moral convictions upon which the American experiment was founded could now somehow be considered a danger to free society."
        --Pope John Paul II

"The time has come to turn to God and reassert our trust in Him for the healing of America... Our country is in need of and ready for a spiritual renewal."
        --Ronald Reagan

"We have to keep in mind we are a nation under God, and if we ever forget that, we'll be just a nation under."
        --Ronald Reagan

"Sometimes when I'm faced with an unbeliever, an atheist, I am tempted to invite him to the greatest gourmet dinner that one could ever serve, and when we finished eating that magnificent dinner, to ask him if he believes there's a cook."
        --Ronald Reagan

"Progress has brought us both unbounded opportunities and unbridled difficulties. Thus, the measure of our civilization will not be that we have done much, but what we have done with that much. I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism. The thought of modern industry in the hands of Christian charity is a dream worth dreaming. The thought of industry in the hands of paganism is a nightmare beyond imagining. The choice between the two is upon us."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"The nation should be ruled by the Ten Commandments."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"No people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with the gratitude to the Giver of good who has blessed us."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"The teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally -- I do not mean figuratively, I mean literally -- impossible for us to figure to ourselves what life would be if these teachings were removed. We would lose almost all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards toward which we, with more or less resolution, strive to raise ourselves."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"There is no patent recipe for getting good citizenship. You get it by applying the old, old rules of decent conduct, the rules in accordance with which decent men have had to shape their lives from the beginning .. fundamental precepts, put forth in the Bible and embodied consciously or unconsciously in the code of morals of every great and successful nation from antiquity to modern times."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"And a noble life is one ordered by, and oriented to, a transcendent moral code, not just one's own concept of existence and meaning and truth. ...if we want a society that reveres life, that defends the family, and that discourages delinquency and promotes decency, we cannot force a privatization of religion; we must allow the truth-claims of religious faith to be uttered aloud in the public square."
        --Sen. Rick Santorum

"The Promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being, and attributes, and providences of one Almighty God; the responsibility to Him for all our actions, founded upon moral accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social and benevolent virtues --these can never be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how any civilized society can well exist without them."
        --Justice Joseph Story, 1845

"We are not to attribute this prohibition of a national religious establishment [in the First Amendment] to an indifference to religion in general, and especially to Christianity (which none could hold in more reverence than the framers of the Constitution).... Any attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation."
        --Justice Joseph Story,appointed by President James Madison in 1811 as Justice to the United States Supreme Court.

"Despotism can do without religion, but Democracy can not."
        --Alexis de Tocqueville

"We must never forget that this coutry was founded by men who came to these shores to worship God as they pleased. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, all came here for this great purpose. They did not come here to do as they pleased -- but to worship God as they pleased, and that is an important distinction."
        --Harry S. Truman

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."
        --George Washington

"While all men within our territories are protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of their consciences; it is rationally to be expected from them in return, that they will [demonstrate] the innocence of their lives and the beneficence of their actions; for no man, who is profligate in his morals, or a bad member of the civil community, can possibly be a true Christian, or a credit to his own religious society."
        --George Washington

"It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect.... The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained: and since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
        --George Washington, First Inaugural Address, 1789