I respect the office of the presidency, but I never worship at the shrines of our public servants... The Washington press corps has the privilege of asking the president of the United States what he is doing and why.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence enshrines the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Alas, that is not the case everywhere in the world.

The dead play a very prominent part in the experience of the wanderer abroad. The houses in which they were born, the tombs in which they lie, the localities they made famous by their good or evil deeds, and the works their genius left behind them are necessarily the chief shrines of his pilgrimage.

The most sacred duty of the President of the United States of America is to defend and protect the Constitution and the principles it enshrines: freedom, fairness, and equality.

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature.