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.
Henry Steele CommagerEvery effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.
Henry Steele CommagerIt seems fair to say that while the moral standards of the nineteenth century persisted almost unchanged into the twentieth, moral practices changed sharply, and that though the standards of the nineteenth century persisted the institutions that had sustained them and the sanctions that had enforced them lost influence and authority.
Henry Steele CommagerEducation is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.
Henry Steele CommagerChange does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.
Henry Steele Commager