Related:

• If one inquires why the American tradition is so strong against any connection of State and Church
  why it dreads even the rudiments of religious teaching in state-maintained schools, the immediate and superficial answer is not far to seek....
• Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality.
  All proffered samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to common tests....
• canonical adj. [very common; historically, `according to religious law'] The usual or standard state or manner of something.
  This word has a somewhat more technical meaning in mathematics....
• They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man.
  These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams -- and still calls for more....
• The Independent quotes this from The Progressive, Sept.
  1990: > > Louisiana State Rep. Carl Gunter, explaining why abortion should > not be permitted even when the pregnancy results from ince...
• Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fi
  and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money....
• I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to ac
  and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him....
• The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be _tremendous and irresistable_.
  Who are the militia? _are they not ourselves_. Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms _each man against his own bosom_....
• The church ought to be separated from the state, and the state from the church.
  -- Pope Pius IX (1792-1878)...