It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
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.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
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.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.
The legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions.
Because we hold it for 'a fundamental and undeniable truth', that religion or 'the duty which we owe to our Creator' and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.
Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him (i.e. Jesus) by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.
Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence, and ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption; all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.
The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.
Conscience is the most sacred of all property.
I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.
Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption
Religious truth, or for that matter any truth, requires a calm and meditative atmosphere for its percolation.
Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.
Science intensifies religious truth by cleansing it of ignorance and superstition.
It is difficult even to attach a precise meaning to the term "scientific truth." So different is the meaning of the word "truth" according to whether we are dealing with a fact of experience, a mathematical proposition or a scientific theory. "Religious truth" conveys nothing clear to me at all.
or simply:
