History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.
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Letter to Alexander von Humboldt (6 December 1813)
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Scanned letter at The Library of Congress
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Transcript at The Library of Congress.Thomas Jefferson
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I observe the great and wonderful mistake, both our own and our fathers, as to the civil powers of this world, acting in spiritual matters. I have read ... the last will and testament of the Lord Jesus over many times, and yet I cannot find by one tittle of that testament that if He had been pleased to have accepted of a temporal crown and government that ever He would have put forth the least finger of temporal or civil power in the matters of His spiritual affairs and Kingdom.
Hence must it lamentably be against the testimony of Christ Jesus for the civil state to impose upon the souls of the people a religion, a worship, a ministry, oaths (in religious and civil affairs), tithes, times, days, marryings, and buryings in holy ground...Roger Williams
"...and the federal government is supposed to be the servant to the state government, states are supposed to be supreme, states' rights. Which goes into a long story of the wrong side winning the civil war, right? What was the civil war, it was Abe Lincoln's war, it wasn't the civil war..."
Kent Hovind
In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government... the poorer and less free the people.
Ilana Mercer
The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle of civil, and that civil liberty is the necessary condition of religious, was a discovery reserved for the seventeenth century.
John (Lord Acton) Acton
The greater the share the people have in government, the less liberty, civil or religious, does a nation enjoy.
John Wesley
Jefferson, Thomas
Jeffrey, Francis
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