Even at church, people would not shake my hand.

Thomas Haden Church

It must not content us to take our bodies to church if we leave our hearts at home.

We ought to regard the sacrament of baptism with reverence. An ordinance of which the Lord Jesus Himself partook, is not to be lightly esteemed. An ordinance to which the great Head of the Church submitted, ought to be ever honorable in the eyes of professing Christians.

It would have been well for the church of Christ, if the warnings of the Gospel had been as much studied as its promises.

The cause of sin is never so much helped as when Christians waste their strength in quarreling with one another, and spend their time in petty squabbles.

Good hymns are an immense blessing to the Church. They train people for heaven, where praise is one of the principal occupations.

It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.

A beggarly people, A church and no steeple

The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts

Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt.

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

The apostles and their successors are God’s vicars in governing the Church which is built on faith and the sacraments of faith. Wherefore, just as they may not institute another Church, so neither may they deliver another faith, nor institute other sacraments

Power is of an encroaching nature.

[The proposed establishment] will have a . . . tendency to banish our Citizens. . . . To superadd a fresh motive to emigration by revoking the liberty which they now enjoy, would be the same species of folly which has dishonoured and depopulated flourishing kingdoms.

The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him.

[T]here remains [in some parts of the country] a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Govt. & Religion neither can be duly supported. Such indeed is the tendency to such a coalition, and such its corrupting influence on both parties, that the danger cannot be too carefully guarded agst.

Besides the danger of a direct mixture of religion and civil government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations. The establishment of the chaplainship in Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights as well as of Constitutional principles. The danger of silent accumulations and encroachments by ecclesiastical bodies has not sufficiently engaged attention in the U.S.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.

[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803]

Classical music only really came into my life in 1969. I wish I had heard classical music and church music when I was a teenager or even as a child.

The reason I always loved ‘The Omen’ so much, and what has always been scariest to me, is anything to do with God. Anything to do with God is quite frightening because fear is something that’s very much expressed in a church environment, and I grew up in one. And the fear of God was very much instilled me at a very young age.

Oh God, I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, but I grew up falling asleep in church because I was tired from watching horror movies late at night.

I am a vicar’s daughter and still a practicing member of the Church of England

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit

The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion

The Christian church has set up a religion of pomp and revenue in pretended imitation of a person (Jesus) who lived a life of poverty.

It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.

The Book of Job and the 19th Psalm, which even the Church admits to be more ancient than the chronological order in which they stand in the book called the Bible, are theological orations conformable to the original system of theology

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church

My mind is my own church

Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

I read a lot on the subject and had many conversations, and I have come to the conclusion that the Catholic Church is a force for evil.

The Catholic Church is an innately conservative rock – they call themselves the ‘rock of Peter’ – and its resistance to change is, ironically, what has kept it constant throughout the ages.

I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs – The name They dropped opon my face With water, in the country church Is finished using, now, And They can put it with my Dolls, My childhood, and the string of spools, I’ve finished threading – too

Christ is waiting with longing desire for the manifestation of Himself in His church. When the character of Christ shall be perfectly reproduced in His people, then He will come to claim them as His own.

There is but one church in the world who are at the present time standing in the breach and making up the hedge, building up the old waste places.

My mom is very religious—Catholic—and from a young age they brought me to the church.

Every individual in the church is free to think as he pleases.

The church as an institution does not involve itself in politics, nor does it permit the use of its buildings or facilities for political purposes. Now, we do become involved if there is a moral issue or something that comes to the legislative calendar which directly affects the church.

I can’t understand it. The very name of the savior is in the name of the church. The New Testament is a fundamental scripture for us. I can’t understand why they take that position.

I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful

The man of the Cross, who heads the church whose symbol is the Cross, under which Jews were killed for generations. I could not escape the feeling. It stuck with me. And he felt it-that a Jewess was sitting opposite him.

We do not want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.

Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.

He told his wife I’m truly sorry to distress you, but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.

At that moment the church bells began to ring.

Church on time, makes me party.

If Christ is not all to you He is nothing to you. He will never go into partnership as a part Saviour of men. If He be something He must be everything, and if He be not everything He is nothing to you.

That very church which the world likes best is sure to be that which God abhors.

Believe me, if a church does not pray, it is dead.

It is better to think of church in the ale-house than to think of the ale-house in church.

There warn’t anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn’t any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it’s cool. If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to: but a hog is different.

Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, some body of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage transmitted through the Church, the family, and the school.

The expiatory church of La Sagrada Família is made by the people and is mirrored in them. It is a work that is in the hands of God and the will of the people.

There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the church. I will grow old but others will come after me. What must always be conserved is the spirit of the work, but its life has to depend on the generations it is handed down to and with whom it lives and is incarnated

My style, my stamina, my system were molded down in the basement of a church in East End.

My family, frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn’t raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.

Sadly, the smallest meeting in a church is a prayer meeting.

No matter how big your church is; its true size is measured by the size of the prayer meetings.

I love my ink. They all have a meaning. I’m very strong in my faith, so I wanted to have some religious images. I’ve got Pieta, a Michelangelo sculpture of Mary holding Jesus after he came off the cross, on my shoulder. A sacred heart on my arm. Musical notes because I love music. The compass on my chest is there because church is my compass.