Simon Schama Quotes

We certainly love the Muslim people. But that is not the faith of this country. And that is not the religion that built this nation. The people of the Christian faith and the Jewish faith are the ones who built America, and it is not Islam.

I certainly do not support excluding faith from public life.

I think that America is a nation of faith. I do believe that. Certainly by way of heritage - there's a powerful Christian thread through all of American history.

Catholics and Protestants remained faithful to their religions, but stopped thinking of them in zero-sum terms and gradually embraced the separation between church and state.

I’m trying to be a real Muslim, who respects others and respects the freedom of the people to choose their own religious denominations or even to not believe in God in the first place.

I'm very keen on having true freedom of expression. True freedom of faith. And free practice of religious faith.

I think church and state should remain entirely separate at all costs, and that the decision of religious marriage should be of each faith to debate and decide free of political influence.

Someone who wanted to challenge Orthodoxy would not be able to locate a building to hold a protest march in front of. The faith is too diffused.

I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism - whatever it may be.

I want to learn about a different religion. I grew up Catholic, but my grandfather was Jewish. Knowledge about other religions can help you understand your own better. I think it's kind of hypocritical to believe one thing and don't know about any others.

I'm a practicing Christian - and I'm going to keep practicing till I get it right - but I don't feel everyone has to practice the same religion that I do. You have a right to worship who you choose and how you choose to.

In America you have the right to worship any way you choose. That's why virtually every faith and every denomination on Earth has a presence in our land. You have a right to not believe in God at all.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.

The battleground has been moderates of all faith traditions in all the countries of the world against the radicals of all faith traditions in all parts of the world.

I do understand that America is a predominantly Christian country. A lot of morals and values are based in Christianity as opposed to Buddhism, which it's not, or Judaism, which it's not, or Islam, which it's definitely not. So I'm not going to lie to myself and just be like, 'Well you know, everybody's equal.' Because we're not.

Religiously the Empire was pluralistic and marked by a search for a faith which would be satisfying intellectually and ethically and would give assurance of immortality.

Most people I know are not hard-core religious people. They are what I would call 'lightly religious.' So I don't buy the notion that we can't laugh about religion in America.

What I find is that we're all human beings and that it's all very similar, what we believe. At the bottom, there's really not that much difference between Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists. We all worship God.

One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people's religions, since ours is nuttier than yours.

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.

God requireth not a uniformity of religion.

Let there be no two religions in Arabia.

As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another only to scoff, I conclude, in accordance with what has gone before, that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity.

This is a Christian nation.

The religion of one seems madness unto another.