Mosque Quotes

The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation - much like building a mosque at Ground Zero.

The Muslims have, as everyone else says, the right to practice their religion and they have the right to construct a mosque at ground zero if they wish. What I am saying, though, is that they should listen to public opinion, they should listen to the deep wounds and anguish that this is causing to so many good people.

It's perfectly fair that you can't be a Roman Catholic priest unless you're a man. It seems right that the reach of anti-discriminatory law should stop at the door of the church or mosque.

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

And if the imam and the Muslim leadership in that community is so intent on building bridges, then they should voluntarily move the mosque away from ground zero and move it whether it's uptown or somewhere else, but move it away from that area, the same as the pope directed the Carmelite nuns to move a convent away from Auschwitz.

But I do think it's unwise, and it - to build a mosque at the site where 3,000 Americans lost their lives as a result of a terrorist attack. And I think to me it demonstrates that the - that Washington, the White House, the administration, the President himself seems to be disconnected from the mainstream of America.

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?

Those people behind the mosque have to respect, have to appreciate and have to defer to the people of New York. The wound is still there. Just because the wound is healing you can't say, 'Let's just go back to where we were pre-9/11.

Those who reject integration programs in the long term have as little right to stay in Germany as a hate preacher paid from abroad in a mosque.

Does the imam have a legal right to build the mosque at Ground Zero? The answer is yes. But is it the right thing to do? The answer is no. And most Americans, and most moderate Muslims, join with me in that call.