Great Throughts Treasury

"Religious faith is not a storm cellar to which men and women can flee for refuge from the storms of life. It is, instead, an inner spiritual strength which enables them to face those storms with hope and serenity. Religious faith has the miraculous power to lift ordinary human beings to greatness in seasons of stress."

"Humor is one of God’s most marvelous gifts. Humor give us smiles, laughter, and gaiety. Humor reveals the roses and hides the thorns. Humor makes our heavy burden light and smooths the rough spots in our pathways. Humor endows us with the capacity to clarify the obscure, to simplify the complex, to deflate the pompous, to chastise the arrogant, to point a moral, and to adorn a tale."

"A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it."

"Churches should look to their members and their friends only for the financing of their undertakings, and no church should engage in any undertaking, no matter how laudable it may be, that its members and friends are unable or unwilling to finance."

"A leader is someone who helps improve the lives of other people or improve the system they live under."

"A school prayer amendment would confer upon public school boards a power the First Amendment now denies to Congress and the states, that is, the power to establish religion."

"Every American has the constitutional right not to be taxed or have his tax money expended for the establishment of religion."

"Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn't belong to the White House aides. What meat do they eat that makes them grow so great?"

"Faith is not a storm cellar to which men and women can flee for refuge from the storms of life. It is, instead, an inner force that gives them the strength to face those storms and their consequences with serenity of spirit."

"I don't think either one of them would have recognized the Bill of Rights if they met it on the street in broad daylight under a cloudless sky."

"I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate."

"If religious freedom is to endure in America, the responsibility for teaching religion to public school children must be left to the homes and churches of our land, where this responsibility rightfully belongs."

"If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen."

"If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were in effect breaking into the home of every citizen of the United States. And if these allegations prove to be true, what they were seeking to steal was not the jewels, money or other precious property of American citizens, but something much more valuable - their most precious heritage: the right to vote in a free election."

"I'll have you understand I am running this court, and the law hasn't got a damn thing to do with it!"

"Government is contemptuous of true religion when it confiscates the taxes of Caesar to finance the things of God."

"For too long the issue of government aid to church related organizations has been a divisive force in our society and in the Congress. It has erected communication barriers among our religions and fostered intolerance."

"He had the most pronounced, aggravated notion about the powers of the presidency. He envisioned the President as being something of an absolute monarch."

"I believe in a wall between church and state so high that no one can climb over it."

"I'm not going to let anybody come down at night like Nicodemus and whisper something in my ear that no one else can hear. That is not executive privilege; it is poppycock."

"It must not be assumed by the government through the agency of the public school system."

"I've always been worried about people who are willing to work for nothing. Sometimes that's all you get from them, nothing."

"Judicial verbicide is calculated to convert the Constitution into a worthless scrap of paper and to replace our government of laws with a judicial oligarchy."

"Let books be your friends, for, by so doing, you can summon to your fireside in seasons of loneliness the choice spirits of all the ages. Observe mankind through the eyes of charity, for, by so doing, you will discover anew the oft forgotten fact that earth is peopled with many gallant souls. Study nature and walks at times in solitude beneath the starry heavens, for, by so doing, you will absorb the great lesson that God is infinite and that your life is just a little beat within the heart of time. Cling to the ancient landmarks of truth, but be ever ready to test the soundness of a new idea. Accept whatever your mind finds to be true, and whatever your conscience determines to be right, and whatever your heart declares to be noble, even though your act in so doing may drive a hoary prejudice from its throne. And, above all things, meditate often upon the words and deeds of Him who died on Calvary for, by so doing, 'ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.'"

"Murder and theft have been committed since the earliest history of mankind, but that fact has not made murder meritorious or larceny legal."

"Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft."

"The Constitution did not confer upon the President the arbitrary power to suspend any of its provisions. On the contrary it gave him no powers except those expressly stated and those necessarily implied from them. The Constitution was written that way to restrain the President from tyranny."

"The President is a servant of the Constitution and not it's master. There is nothing explicit or implicit in that instrument which exempts him from a duty the law imposes on all competent human beings in our land."

"The President seems to extend executive privilege way out past the atmosphere. What he says is executive privilege is nothing but executive poppycock."

"The rain it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella; But chiefly on the just, because The unjust steals the just's umbrella."

"The world of the mind is an illimitable land whose boundaries are as vast as the universe itself....and thought is calling us at all times to the undiscovered countries lying beyond the next visible range of mountains."

"There is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes or makes it the official duty of a president to have anything to do with criminal activities."

"What James Madison and the other men of his generation had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment was that there should be no official relationship of any character between government and any church or many churches, and no levying of taxes for the support of any church, or many churches, or all churches, or any institution conducted by any of them."

"When I win, I crow softly, if at all; and when I lose, I weep gently, if at all. I do not consider President Nixon's change of mind a surrender to me. I consider it a victory for the constitutional government in America."

"When religion controls government, political liberty dies; and when government controls religion, religious liberty perishes."

"President Ford did infinite injury to the indispensable principle of good government embodied in the phrase Equal justice under the law."

"Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion."