I believed what my father taught me about the separation of church and state, so when I was President I never invited Billy Graham to have services in the White House because I didn’t think that was appropriate. He was injured a little bit, until I explained it to him.

Religion, any religion, no matter what sort of wonderful religion, never be universal. So now education is universal, so we have to sort of find ways and means through education system, from kindergarten up to university level, to make awareness these good things, the values, inner values.

The gospel to me is simply irresistible.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

Faith never makes a confession.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.

A lot of people are realizing they had the wool pulled over their eyes by Obama.

Liberals are not always so liberal with people who disapprove – disapprove of their point of view.

A Christian who does not pray for those who govern is not a good Christian.

And if a person is religious, I think it’s good, it helps you a bit. But if you’re not, at least you can have the sense that there is a condition inside you which looks at the stars with amazement and awe.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

It’s impossible, I think, however much I’d become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don’t think I’d ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

Before the throne of the Almighty, man will be judged not by his acts but by his intentions. For God alone reads our hearts.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

If you’d have said Evangelical in 1957, most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. And then, they’d be against it.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

That I am not a member of any Christian church is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures, and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.

I don’t want to express my opinion about actual politics, because if I do, I have to be responsible for my decision.

The humanists‘ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

As a global society, we do not have to agree, endorse or condone the lifestyle choices of others. However, history has taught us that we equally cannot and should not excuse those who would hide behind religion or misuse God’s word to justify bigotry and persecution.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows – marriage does.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

I think, in politics, half the people are gonna like you, and half the people are not gonna like you, no matter what you do or what you say… It’s like there are no right answers. If there were, everyone would choose the right answers. They’re all opinions.

A President cannot always be popular.

I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don’t think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths.

A master performer like Bill Clinton never lost sight of the fact that as president he had to project confidence and power, but if he was speaking to a group of autoworkers he would adjust his accent and his words to fit the audience, and do the same for a group of executives.

It is just as important that business keep out of government as that government keep out of business.

God tells us not to judge one another, no matter what anyone’s sexual preferences are or if they’re black, brown or purple.

Communism has decided against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion.

If a man reaches the heart of his own religion, he has reached the heart of the others, too. There is only one God, and there are many paths to him.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

Politics is applesauce.

Find new ways to spread the word of God to every corner of the world.

I am radically, insanely, nutty in love with Jesus!

The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed in 1978 or ’79.

When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were – to the very last minute – a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.