History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.

The decision for complete religious freedom and for separation of church and state in the eyes of the rest of the world was perhaps the most important decision reached in the New World. Everywhere in the western world of the 18th century, church and state were one; and everywhere the state maintained an established church and tried to force conformity to its dogma.

Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.

Its awfully hard to be the son of a great man and also of a half-crazy woman.

In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted.