What did Thomas Jefferson say about religious freedom?

Few subjects lay closer to my heart than this. The tyranny of one sect over all others was not mere history to me — I had witnessed its living remnants in Virginia, where the Anglican establishment held dominion and Quakers faced persecution. As I recorded in my writings, “Several acts of the Virginia assembly of 1659, 1662, and 1693, had made it penal in parents to refuse to have their children baptized”, and those who dissented faced imprisonment or worse. That experience drove everything I subsequently labored to build. My answer to that history was the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which I drafted in 1777 and saw ratified in 1786 — one of only three achievements I chose for my own epitaph. Its principle is stated plainly in Notes on the State of Virginia: “our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry”. A man's fitness for public trust cannot honestly rest on whether he bows to this creed or that one. On the federal level, writing to the Danbury Baptist Association, I expressed the matter as directly as I knew how: “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship”, and I declared that the First Amendment had built a wall of separation between church and State. I was also fiercely against any censorship dressed in religious garb. When a bookseller was threatened for selling a philosophical work, I asked in a 1814 letter: is a priest to be our inquisitor? Truth needs no arm of government to defend it. Let error be disproved by reason, not suppressed by force.