“Where Church and State are habitually associated it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.”

— James Russell Lowell

Dryden
Literary Essays, vol. III (1870-1890)

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James Russell Lowell 175

American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat 1819–1891

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“No, I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.… I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

Attributed by atheist activist Robert I. Sherman, reporting on remarks at a public press conference Bush held at O'Hare Airport on 27 August 1987 just after announcing his candidacy for president. Initially reported soon after the incident, years afterward disputes on the accuracy of the reports arose, as indicated at "Documents at Bush Presidential Library Prove VP Bush Questioned Citizenship and Patriotism of Atheists" (1 April 2006) at RobSherman.com https://web.archive.org/web/20150102092456/http://www.robsherman.com:80/advocacy/060401a.htm. Other journalists present have neither confirmed nor contradicted Sherman's account of the exchange. Sherman cites official correspondence about the incident between Jon Garth Murra, President of American Atheists, and White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray in December 1988, as clearly documenting that this was publicly reported prior to that time, and the accuracy of the remarks not contested, though implications of them in regard to actual stances on civil rights were.
Frequently misquoted as "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots."
[1988, Fall, On the Barricades: Bush on Atheism, GALA Interim, Free Inquiry, 8, 4, 0272-0701, 16]
[1990-10-22, Do We Want Atheist Army?, Tom, Tiede, Waycross Journal-Herald, 73, 250, 3, http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KltaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=yUwNAAAAIBAJ&pg=4651,702629]
Disputed

“Where did these two elements in our nature, egoism and altruism, come from? Why have human beings and all other beings known to terrestrial intelligence these two elements, just as they are, in their natures? Why have they not all egoism or all altruism? Why have not the beings in the universe a tendency to act each for its own individual self without any particle of regard for others? Or why are they not so natured as to be oblivious of self and conscious only of those around them? These are profound questions and questions of superlative importance to the student of social culture. What the social scientist is attempting to do, or should be attempting to do, is to ameliorate the relation of associated beings, and this is to be accomplished by improving the conduct or modifying the modes of motion of these beings. And it is necessary in order to modify these modes of motion to know where and how these modes of motion have been acquired. It is impossible for a physician to prescribe rationally to a pathology whose causation he does not know.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, pp. 98–99

“This evening, we know that at least one police officer was killed, and another injured. This imponderable problem, this menace will be part of our daily lives for the years to come. I express all my support in this regard for our police forces and the forces of law and order. I am thinking of the victim's family.””

Emmanuel Macron (1977) 25th President of the French Republic

20 April 2017 https://www.facebook.com/EmmanuelMacron/posts/1951134895119087/
2017
Original: (fr) Ce soir, on sait qu'au moins un policier a été tué, qu’un autre a été blessé. Cet impondérable, cette menace fera partie du quotidien des prochaines années. Je témoigne toute ma solidarité à l’égard de nos forces de police, de nos forces de l’ordre. J'ai une pensée pour la famille de la victime.

“Music is associated not only with speculation but with morality. When rhythms and modes reach an intellect through the ear, they doubtless affect and reshape that mind according to their particular character.”

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480) philosopher of the early 6th century

Christopher Callahan (October 2000), Music in Medieval Medical Practice: Speculations and Certainties https://symposium.music.org/index.php/40/item/2168-music-in-medieval-medical-practice-speculations-and-certainties#16
De Institutione Musica

“We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Faith in America speech, 2007

“Once the church is ready to associate with instituted power it is obliged to associate with all and sundry forms of the state. The scandal is that each time the church seeks to justify both its adaptation and the existing power. It continues to legitimize the state and to be an instrument of its propaganda.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 126

“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Life of Milton
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“After the Council of Nicea, … the State supported the associated churches by all the means in its power. It recognized the decisions of their councils and enforced them with civil pains and penalties; it also recognized the sentences of deposition and excommunication passed on members of the clergy or laity belonging to any one of the associated churches and followed them with civil disabilities. It did its best to destroy all Christianity outside of the associated churches, and largely succeeded. The rigour of the state persecution directed against Christian nonconformists in the fourth and fifth centuries has not received the attention due to it. The state confiscated their churches and ecclesiastical property (sometimes their private property also); it prohibited under penalty of proscription and death their meeting for public worship; it took from the nonconformist Christians the right to inherit or bequeath property by will; it banished their clergy; finally, it made raids upon them by its soldiery and sometimes butchered whole communities, as was the case with the Montanists in Phrygia and with the Donatists in Africa. And this glaringly un-Christian mode of creating and vindicating the visible unity of the Catholic Church of Christ was vigorously encouraged by the leaders of the associated churches who had the recognition and support of the State.”

Thomas Martin Lindsay (1843–1914) Scottish historian, professor and principal of the Free Church College, Glasgow

The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries (1903), p. 360 http://books.google.com/books?id=IvUsAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA360

“The Indian religious traditions… accepted the concept of non-being on an equal footing with that of being. Like many other Eastern religions, the Indian culture regarded Nothing as a state from which one might have come and to which one might return.. Where Western religious traditions sought to flee from nothingness… a state of non-being was something to be actively sought by Buddhist and Hindus in order to achieve Nirvana: oneness with the Cosmos.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

Source: The Book of Nothing (2009), chapter one "Zero—The Whole Story"

“Where Church and State are habitually associated it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.”

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James Russell Lowell 175

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