School Prayer Quotes & Sayings

In 1962 and 1963, there were two abominable decisions out of the Supreme Court, and that was taking prayer out of school, and taking bible reading out of school. But you know, if you look at the statistics, two very critical things happened after that date. Number one: teen pregnancy skyrocketed. Number two: violent crime skyrocketed. — Rafael Cruz

[The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history's dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century. — Thomas Frank

In 1962, the Supreme Court banned organized prayer from public schools. Since then, federal, state, and local courts and officials, including public school administrators, have joined in a nationwide search and destroy mission for student religious practices. — Ralph E. Reed Jr.

Right now religion has the romantic aura of the forbidden - Christ is cool. We need to bring it into the schools, which kids already hate, and associate it firmly with boredom, regulation, condescension, makework and de facto segregation ... Prayer in the schools will rid us of the bland no-offense ecumenism that is so infuriating to us anticlericals: Oh, so now you say Jews didn't kill Christ - a little on the late side, isn't it? — Katha Pollitt

Becoming a footballer is only the first half of the silent prayer a kid offers up to the sky or confides to his teacher in a primary school essay. The second part is the name of the team he wants to play for. — Andrea Pirlo

I remember being at school during morning meeting and looking around at everybody, 350 kids, saying a prayer. We're all very young and no one knows what it means, and I remember feeling strange that people were just repeating words that they didn't understand. I refused to participate. For some reason I always rejected it, but respectfully. — Sean Durkin

If you have never felt your soul poured out before the Lord with a consequent exhaustion, it is doubtful whether you have advanced far in the school of prayer. — Walter J Chantry

Instead of school busing and prayer in schools, which are both controversial, why not a joint solution? Prayer in buses. Just drive these kids around all day and let them pray their fuckn' empty little heads off. — George Carlin

Our tears are not enough. Our words and our prayers are not enough. If we really want to honor these twelve men and women, if we really want to be a country where we can go to work and go to school and walk our streets free from senseless violence, without so many lives being stolen by a bullet from a gun, then we're gonna have to change. We're gonna have to change. — Barack Obama

If prayer is to leave the public schools, let the ridicule of prayer leave also. — Boyd K. Packer

And I'll tell you another thing, you won't find any candidate that supports prayer in school and gay marriage. For that reason alone, people should vote for an independent-thinking person. — Kinky Friedman

I prayed to dispel my fear, until suddenly, and I do not know how the idea came to me, I began to pray for others. I prayed for everyone who came into my thoughts - - people with whom I had traveled, those who had been in prison with me, my school friends of years ago. I do not know how long I continued my prayer, but this I do know - - my fear was gone! Interceding for others had released me! — Corrie Ten Boom

I'm anticlerical, not antireligion. If somebody believes there is God, I'm not interested in trying to persuade that person there is no intelligent design to the universe. Where I become interested and wake up is about the temporal power of religion, things like prayer in schools, or Catholic-secular hospital mergers. — Katha Pollitt

After you are here, I will try not to become one of those parents who brag incessantly about their children, who force them to recite the alphabet backward or sing the Lord's Prayer in German to horrified dinner guests. One of those parents who tell people who aren't interested and haven't askd what their progeny's grade-point average is, what school they go to, how handsome and brilliant and psychic they are.
If something goes awry and I do become one of those parents, you have my permission to sneak into my bedroom while I am sleeping and pinch my nostrils shut. — Suzanne Finnamore

A school prayer amendment would confer upon public school boards a power the First Amendment now denies to Congress and the states, that is, the power to establish religion. — Sam Ervin

He would have given anything for a tension-breaker-maybe, if he prayed hard enough, the school would catch on fire or something. — Christian M. Frank

Restoring prayer ... will scarcely at this date solve the grievous public school problem. Public schools are expensive and massive centers for cultural and ideological brainwashing, at which they are unfortunately far more effective than in teaching the 3 R's or in keeping simple order within the schools. Any plan to begin dismantling the public school monstrosity is met with effective opposition by the teachers' and educators' unions. Truly radical change is needed to shift education from public to unregulated private schooling, religious and secular, as well as home schooling by parents. — Murray Rothbard

Lord! teach me to tarry with Thee in the school, and give Thee time to train me. May a deep sense of my ignorance, of the wonderful privilege and power of prayer, of the need of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of prayer, lead me to cast away my thoughts of what I think I know, and make me kneel before Thee in true teachableness and poverty of spirit. — Andrew Murray

[The notion of separating church and state with such policies as disallowing prayer in public schools] is a deception from Satan. — Joyce Meyer

School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer. — Simone Weil

We seek a constitutional amendment to permit voluntary school prayer. God should never have been expelled from America's classrooms in the first place. — Ronald Reagan

As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school. — Cokie Roberts

I first began to read religious books at school, and especially the Bible, when I was eleven years old; and almost immediately commenced a habit of secret prayer. — Francis W. Newman

Ask and you shall receive; everyone that asks receives. This is the fixed eternal law of the kingdom: If you ask and receive not, it must be because there is something amiss or wanting in the prayer. Hold on; let the Word and Spirit teach you to prat aright, but do not let go the confidence he seeks to waken: Everyone who asks receives ... Let every learner in the school of Christ therefore take the Master's word in all simplicity ... Let us beware of weakening the word with our human wisdom. — Andrew Murray

I know that some believe that voluntary prayer in schools should be restricted to a moment of silence. We already have the right to remain silent - we can take our Fifth Amendment. — Ronald Reagan

Prayer, in essence, is conversation with God. You can talk to Him about anything and everything - He loves to hear from His children. Praise Him for His incredible love, tell Him why you love your favorite song, ask Him for help with problems at home, work or school and thank Him for His responses. — Teresa Santoski

Last year I was on Pat Robertson's show, and we discussed our basic Christian faith - for instance, separation of church and state. It's contrary to my beliefs to try to exalt Christianity as having some sort of preferential status in the United States. That violates the Constitution. I'm not in favor of mandatory prayer in school or of using public funds to finance religious education. — Jimmy Carter

Rick Perry said Obama's suggestions for gun control disgust him. He said the real answer to this problem isn't laws, it's prayer. You know, i know you're not supposed to say this about elected officials, but I would pay to see Rick Perry defend himself against a school shooter with prayer. — Bill Maher

Republicans are all about Old Glory and school prayer and the sanctity of marriage and the Fatherhood of God but when it comes to actually needing help from them, you shouldn't get your hopes up. They might send an ambulance or they might just send a Get Well card. — Garrison Keillor

Students in the school of prayer never graduate from the school of the Gospel. — C.J. Mahaney

Many times I have been driven to prayer. When I was in Bible school I didn't know what to do with my life. I used to walk the streets ... and pray, sometimes for hours at a time. In His timing, God answered those prayers, and since then prayer has been an essential part of my life. — Billy Graham

Whenever you pray, make sure you do it at school assemblies and football games, like the demonstrative creatures who pray before large television audiences. That is the real goal of the thing. But do not, I urge you, pray all alone in your home where no one can see. That does not get you ratings. — Garry Wills

There are two sorts of prayer: personal and intercessory. The latter ordinarily occupies the lesser part of our time and energy. This may not be. Christ has opened the school of prayer specially to train intercessors for the great work of bringing down, by their faith and prayer, the blessings of His work and love on the world around. There can be no deep growth in prayer unless this be made our aim. — Andrew Murray

I'll tell you right now. I'm for prayer in school. — Kinky Friedman

My mother was a Sunday school teacher. So I am a byproduct of prayer. My mom just kept on praying for her son. — Steve Harvey

People for the American Way says it has yet to find anyone who has made a stronger case against the proposed school prayer Constitutional amendment ... What kind of prayer would we use? — Cal Thomas

Banning prayer in school in effect made God unconstitutional. — Rush Limbaugh

("A Free Market in Education: The Answer to Prayer, And Other Issues")
No matter where you are on the issue, there is no solution to it within a government school context, only perpetual conflict. The answer involves choice, competition and private alternatives. If you don't like what a business offers, you don't argue endlessly about it; you walk across the street. Why is this principle so complicated for some people? — Lawrence W. Reed

For Foucauld and the Little Brothers, life in the desert was not a flight from the world but rather a school of love and prayer to learn to enter more deeply into humanity. Their goal was to shout the gospel not so much with their mouths as with their lives. — Brennan Manning

Ask a fellow if he favors organized prayer in the public schools. If he says 'No' he's a liberal. If he says 'Yes' he's a conservative. If he says, 'Public schools? The Constitution grants the government no power to run any mandatory tax-funded youth propaganda camps,' you have your hands on the wily libertarian. — Vin Suprynowicz

Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night. — Pico Iyer

Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that would be eliminated from schools, too? — Red Skelton

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. — Garrison Keillor

I think the greatest gift we can give our children is the experience of deep quiet. If we don't help our children cultivate contemplation, reflection, prayer, meditation, or whatever other practice of mindfulness, then they're likely to be completely spun out of their center by the time they're in grade school. — Marianne Williamson

BY THE END OF MY JUNIOR YEAR, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WERE MAKING their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. In March of 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas - one aged thirteen, the other eleven - set off a fire alarm to make their fellow students run outside, then opened fire from the trees. They killed four students and a teacher. Finally, Kip Kinkel went on a rampage in Springfield, Oregon in May of 1998. He murdered both of his parents at home, then went to school, killed two students, and wounded twenty-two others. — Brooks Brown

We should all without shame enrol in the school of contemplative prayer. — Richard J. Foster

The Psalter is the great school of prayer. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A perfect example of the power of prayer is when a blizzard closes the schools on the day of a big exam. — Doug Larson

Perhaps there was a correlation between taking prayer and Bible study out of schools, and what has happened in our society. — Rafael Cruz

The Rosary is a school of Prayer. The Rosary is a school of Faith. — Pope Francis

I'm for prayer in the schools because ritual and ceremony are calming and civilizing, and the little fartlings should be tamped down whenever possible. — Florence King

Some want prayer in school, some want condoms.
Printing prayers on condoms satisfies nobody. — Marshall Fritz

And when I'm feeling glum, because Gregory's away of because my daughter's just hurled her full glass of milk at my head, or just because time is passing, I like to scroll through the annual East Trawley High School online newsletter, which gets mass-emailed by Shanice Morain, who's on her second marriage and who cohosts her own Christian Soul-Support and Teen Prayer Variety Hour on local TV and who's just been appointed our class secretary. In the current Alumni Notes section I read that Katelynn Streedmore has just been named the head dietitian at the Jamesburg Assisted Care Facility, that Cal Malstrup and his wife Chelsea Marie have just welcomed their fifth bundle of joy, whom they've christened Blake-Jorlinda Malstrup, and that Becky Randle is still the Queen of England. — Paul Rudnick

I don't believe in school prayer. I think it's total nonsense ... who is the teacher there that is going to have them pray? And is the teacher going to be Catholic or Mormon or Episcopalian or what? It just causes all sorts of problems. And what are the kids praying about anyway? Does it really matter, does praying in school ... what are you doing it for? The whole thing just opens up all sorts of elements of discussion. I think it's crazy. — Charles M. Schulz

I'm all for teaching creation and allowing prayers in schools, as soon as scholars begin teaching Darwinism and geometry in church. — J. Michael Straczynski

Ashcroft went on to say that our way of life is being threatened by a group of radical religious fanatics who are armed and dangerous. And then he called for prayers in the schools and an end to gun control. — Jay Leno

I suppose there may be a branch president or a high councilor or an elders quorum president or a visiting teacher in the room who wants to know what it is we are to accomplish as Church members when we get together, even if it's only in a home evening group or an opportunity to pray together. Well, this passage indicates that it may have something to do with remembering each other. We all count. Everyone matters. We have a name and it's recorded and we need to remember that here. No one must get lost. "And their names were taken, that they might be remembered and nourished by the good word of God ... to keep them continually watchful unto prayer, relying alone upon the merits of Christ ... to fast and to speak with one another concerning the welfare of their souls ... to observe that there should be no iniquity among them"
what a great thought about meetings and what they are supposed to do, what a Sunday School class can be, what a scriptural discussion in an apartment can be. — Jeffrey R. Holland

Spread out your petition before God, and then say, "Thy will, not mine, be done." The sweetest lesson I have learned in God's school is to let the Lord choose for me. — Dwight L. Moody

Everyone seems to agree that it is Minnesotans' responsibility to assimilate to Somali culture, not the other way around.11 The Catholic University of St. Thomas has installed Islamic prayer rooms and footbaths in order to demonstrate, according to Dean of Students Karen Lange, that the school is "diverse." Minneapolis's mayor, Betsy Hodges, has shown up wearing a full hijab to meetings with Somalis. (In fairness, it was "Forbid Your Daughter to Work Outside the Home" Day.) — Ann Coulter

I'm not in favor of the government mandating a prayer in school because our country was founded on the fact that no particular religious faith would have ascendance over or preferential treatment over any other. — Jimmy Carter

So do fundamentalists believe in majority rights or minority rights? The answer is, apparently, neither. They'll pull whichever argument suits them out of its file when necessary, but basically they are unprincipled on the issue of school prayer. They have a big double standard that basically says, "Whatever I want is right. — Bob Altemeyer

It was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture. — Mary McCarthy

It seems to me that the prayers of the Bible can be distilled into one. The result is a simple, easy-to-remember, pocket-size prayer: Father, you are good. I need help. Heal me and forgive me. They need help. Thank you. In Jesus' name, amen. Let this prayer punctuate your day. As you begin your morning, Father, you are good. As you commute to work or walk the hallways at school, I need help. As you wait in the grocery line, They need help. Keep this prayer in your pocket as you pass through the day. — Max Lucado

It appears that the Soviets are now going to allow prayer in school. One wonders how soon the United States will catch up. — Jeff Cooper

I also able to graciously survive the PhD from the grace, which comes from prayer, bible reading, extensive story reading, fasting, fellowship, listen to music, daily dance and sacred writing. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I did not become a Christian to live the 50s and 60s all over a second time. Muslims have more rights and freedom of religion than I do as a Christian. Tell a Muslim he can't pray at school or at the airport or downtown when prayer time is called for, and see what happens. Tell a Muslim cleric serving as a chaplain in our brilliant military that he has to marry a same-sex couple, and see what happens. — Ken Hutcherson

Jerry Falwell knows who caused the terrorist attack on America: the ACLU. "The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this," he declared on the 700 Club, because, he explained, the ACLU, abetted by the federal courts is responsible for "throwing God out of the public square (and) the public schools."This is a familiar charge and a false one. God is still present in the public schools, where students are free to pray, alone or in groups, so long as their prayers aren't officially sponsored and don't infringe on anyone's freedom not to pray. — Wendy Kaminer

So in addition to being overly reliant on politicians, blacks typically have poor political representation. "Pollsters have long known of the remarkable gap between the leaders and the led in black America," wrote Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. A 1985 survey found that most blacks favored the death penalty and prayer in public schools while most black leaders opposed these things. Most blacks opposed school busing, while most black leaders favored it. Three times as many blacks opposed abortion rights as their leaders did. Indeed, on many key social issues, blacks are more conservative than whites.31 — Jason L. Riley

The traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school. — Jon Meacham

There are times we need a hug. A prayer. A listening ear. The tricky part is that it's not always easy to know when those times will come along. So God made a plan for us to gather, to not neglect meeting together.9 That happens in church, at Sunday school, and in Bible studies, and it happens in our homes - those times when we regularly gather to strengthen the spiritual safety net we all need. — Susie Davis

If a minister can lead the Senate in prayer every day ... what is so wrong with beginning every day of school with an ecumenical prayer? — Jim Webb

I couldn't stop crying because it was so intimate, in that way I always thought being physical with him would feel. If someone had walked in they might have thought Henry was barely touching me. I knew the truth of it.
He was laying me open and bare to him and to God.
There wasn't a more intimate act. I would never recover from this. — Laura Anderson Kurk

The right wing always mobilizes around constitutional amendments: the right to bear arms, school prayer. — Al Sharpton

I'm not making light of prayers here, but of so-called school prayer, which bears as much resemblance to real spiritual experienceas that freeze-dried astronaut food bears to a nice standing rib roast. From what I remember of praying in school, it was almost an insult to God, a rote exercise in moving your mouth while daydreaming or checking out the cutest boy in the seventh grade that was a far, far cry from soul-searching. — Anna Quindlen