You Can Quote Us

Influential Ideas on America's First Freedom


  • "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." - Thomas Jefferson
  • "Man’s capability for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice, makes democracy necessary." - Reinhold Niebuhr
  • "We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home." - Edward R. Murrow
  • "I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the W.S. platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon." - Susan B. Anthony
  • "Freedom and responsibility.  These two words are inseparable because there cannot be responsibility without freedom and vice versa freedom without responsibility might lead to chaos...  Therefore, the balance between freedom of choice and the responsibility for life is the key for our individual and global salvation." - His Excellence Dr. Mustafa Ceric, The Grand Mufti of Bosnia
  • "Justice.  God is Justice.  And we who are in the image of God must be about justice also." - Reverend Philip Berrigan
  • "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg." - Thomas Jefferson
  • "Humanity springs from us, comes from our past, is the one assurance of our future, achieves all things, transcends all faiths and all nationalities.  But we have to learn to exercise humanity collectively and not just individually, for only then will we be at peace with the world." - Sir John Sulston
  • "Justice, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder.  It’s the cornerstone of our system of law based on liberty." - Robert F. Shapiro
  • "I believe the words of the prophet Micah, chapter 6, verse 8, that the request of the Lord to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God, are the center of the Judeo/Christian faith.  It is the prophetic mandate that propels my life and ministry." - The Right Reverend Jane Holmes Dixon, Suffragen Bishop, Washington Diocese of the Episcopal Church(retired)
  • "The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men." - John F. Kennedy
  • "It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America." - Molly Ivins
  • "Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will." - Frederick Douglass
  • "Liberty is the people’s most precious possession and the most difficult and elusive to acquire and maintain." - Norman Dorsen, New York University of Law
  • "A free race cannot be born of slave mothers." - Margaret Sanger
  • "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." - Wendell Phillips
  • "I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." - Thomas Jefferson
  • "Freedom lies in being bold." - Robert Frost
  • "The United States government must not undertake to run the Churches. When an individual, in the Church or out of it, becomes dangerous to the public interest he must be checked." - Abraham Lincoln
  • "Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate." - Ulysses S. Grant
  • "You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." - Clarence Darrow
  • "It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives." - Dorothy Thompson
  • "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security." - Benjamin Franklin
  • "If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other." - Carl Shurz
  • "All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom." - Albert Einstein
  • "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." - Barry Goldwater
  • "Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?" -James Madison
  • "People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution. They don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." - Jamie Raskin
  • "Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired." - Robert F. Kennedy
  • "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." -Sinclair Lewis


The Jefferson Society