These cowards cannot face the Soviet Union. My experience in these four years proves it, that if any confrontation happens, America is going down the drain. These cowards don’t have any guts. If for a five-thousand minority you have to keep your army alert, and the national guard you have to keep close by – and we have only three dozen ordinary guns, not even automatic! And the governor and the attorney general are behaving like mice, not like men. We have been inviting them for four years, “Come here and see with your own eyes, and then decide.” They don’t have even that much courage, to come and see.

So that was simply to make them alert that “before you decide to do any harm, remember you will lose all your honor around the world; you will lose what you have been talking about: democracy, individuality, freedom, freedom of expression. We are not going to lose anything. You will be losing so much that I want you simply to think and count how much you will be losing. And your case against the city is absolutely bogus when we are saying that we don’t have any religion.

Their whole case was that religion is being mixed with state. We don’t have any religion, so how can we mix religion with state? And all these people are religions – and religion is not something that when you become governor or president you put it aside and you become impartial. If you are a fundamentalist Christian, you remain one, if you are a Mohammedan, you remain a Mohammedan. Being religious is something that you are twenty-four hours a day. Even in your sleep you are a Christian or a Hindu. So these people who are all Christians of different brands are mixing religion everywhere with state; otherwise what is the need of The Bible in every court for taking the oath? Certainly the court believes in The Bible; it accepts that The Bible is a holy book. All the Bibles from the courts should be thrown out. For the oath you can keep the constitution of America which is far cleaner. At least it is not Christian, not Hindu, not Mohammedan, not Jewish. And that rotten book, The Holy Bible, not even well written – for what reason do you go on keeping it in the court? Even in the Supreme Court you have to take oath on The Bible.

Here we don’t have any religion, any church, any priest, no ritual, no congregation, nothing that you can point to as religious. I have been telling them, “Come and see. Watch for two or three days: see if you find any religion being mixed with the state – and then go to the court.” But they will not come here, and they have gone to the court. We will fight in the court; and we are absolutely certain of winning because there is no question: all my people are religionless. We don’t believe in any god, we don’t believe in any heaven and hell. We don’t believe in believing. We are scientific seekers. And they are not my followers, they are just my friends. They love me.

Are you not a sort of state in a state?