All religions must be tolerated… for every man must get to heaven in his own way.

Israelis would mostly breathe a sigh of relief if Palestinians were to disappear.

I used to carry my father’s Bible and put it on the pulpit so he could preach.

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

God is not so wary as we, else He would give us no friends, lest we forget Him! The charms of the heaven in the bush are superseded, I fear, by the heaven in the hand, occasionally.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

God doesn’t do things halfway. He goes all out! When God does something, it’s not just barely enough, mediocre or lukewarm.

Vanity, showing off, is an attitude that reduces spirituality to a worldly thing, which is the worst sin that could be committed in the church.

I look forward to death with great anticipation, to meeting God face to face.

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

Here in America, we don’t give in to our fears. We don’t build up walls to keep people out.

If you’ve lost your spirit, even living in the richest country in the world can’t help you become rich.

I am a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all.

No religion has mandated killing others as a requirement for its sustenance or promotion.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

God’s first line of defense – and offense – for every situation is prayer.

Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

Many people think of perfectionism as striving to be your best, but it is not about self-improvement; it’s about earning approval and acceptance.

God doesn’t love me any more or less because I had some work done on my face. You know, I prayed about it a long, long, long, long, long time, because there again, I wouldn’t want to do anything that I felt was going to be offensive to God.

Love of God is not always the same as love of good.

I’m grateful for the evangelical resurgence we’ve seen across the world in the last half-century or so. It truly has been God’s doing.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.

Christians are not limited to any church.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

Things that I felt absolutely sure of but a few years ago, I do not believe now. This thought makes me see more clearly how foolish it would be to expect all men to agree with me.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

The most effective prayers are usually the simple prayers.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it, and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are or where we’re from or what we look like or who we love.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

He chose to honor us with His priesthood. So we honor Him by honoring His priesthood – both its power and those who bear it.

I do not doubt that we would become more useful if we praised God more, and others would join us, for they would see that God has blessed us.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.

Plenty of people wish to become devout, but no one wishes to be humble.

I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Until you have learned to be tolerant with those who do not always agree with you, you will be neither successful nor happy.

I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values – and follow my own moral compass – then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.

Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.

People are looking for something a little more stable; people are feeling like they need to get closer to God.

I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I’m here.

Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

One’s own religion is after all a matter between oneself and one’s Maker and no one else’s.

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.