The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

The nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them.

The freedom or immunity from coercion in matters religious, which is the endowment of persons as individuals, is also to be recognized as their right when they act in community. Religious communities are a requirement of the social nature both of man and of religion itself.

God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.

One religion is as true as another.

Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in mixed company.

Educate people without religion and you make them but clever devils.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

Whatsoever is, is in God.

Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things—but each according to its nature—and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.