Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

It is well that the stately synagogue should lift its walls by the side of the aspiring cathedral, a perpetual reminder that there are many mansions in Father's earthly house as well as in the heavenly ones.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

No man with any sense of humor ever founded a religion.

To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all creeds.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

He who steadily observes those moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ.

Men have torn up the roads which led to Heaven, and which all the world followed; now we have to make our own ladders.