Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

The only foundation for . . . a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.

Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.

The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.

We need an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.

As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side.

If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

The religious man fears, the man of honor scorns, to do an ill action.

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true. If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.

My own view, which does not rely solely on religious faith or even on an original idea, but rather on ordinary common sense, is that establishing binding ethical principles is possible when we take as our starting point the observation that we all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering.

If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.

Religion is the only solid Base of morals and that Morals are the only possible Support of free governments.

When I was at Notre Dame studying under Joe Evans, Frank O'Malley, and others, there was a very lively debate about the distinction between natural law and revealed truth. Most of the philosophers of church and state expected that what was going to be advocated as the law of the land would be related to natural law. If you attempted to draw lines about certain general moral truths that were derivative of logic and reason, they would prove to be widely shared, and therefore suitable to be enacted into law on both the civic and religious sides.

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

It is impossible to maintain freedom and order and justice without religious and moral sanctions.

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.

In such a performance you may lay the foundation of national happiness only in religion, not by leaving it doubtful "whether morals can exist without it," but by asserting that without religion morals are the effects of causes as purely physical as pleasant breezes and fruitful seasons.

Knowledge is truthful only if it’s based in morality.

Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.