Puritanism Quotes

Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement.

By all means read the Puritans, they are worth more than all the modern stuff put together.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

When you think about Puritanism, you must begin by getting rid of the slang term 'Puritanism' as applied to Victorian religious hypocrisy. This does not apply to seventeenth-century Puritanism.

There is a hearty Puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787. It is the work of men who believed in original sin, and were resolved to leave open for transgressors no door which they could possibly shut.

[On swingers:] They have gone from Puritanism into promiscuity without passing through sensuality.

The American obliviousness towards the suffering of Palestinians refugees plays a major part in radicalizing people. And we are fanning the flames of puritanism.

Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.

Nothing evokes the prurient like puritanism.

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

The world and you must part, or Christ and you will never meet.

I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.

They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

We won't dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We'd rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of puritanism and then go home and take a pill.

The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.

There IS more criticism of puritanism, and more distance from Christian morality, than there has been before.

Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism.

Did you know that Puritanism went hand in hand with dirt, that Oliver Cromwell put a 100 per cent tax on soap and that the repeal of the soap tax was one of the most popular acts of Charles II at his Restoration?

But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

The puritan through life's sweet garden goes to pluck the thorn and cast away the rose.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

Many of us grew up with a kind of puritanism against shopping. But shopping can be much more than how it is cast. If you are bored or you have problems, it can be a way of lifting your spirits, by doing something light and superficial. Why not?

I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.

Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You're on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted. I think a lot of women are contained within the parentheses of shoulds and role-play. It's all about entitlement and history. It's all about upper-body strength - and exacting your will.

Prayer is my chief work, and it is by means of it that I carry on the rest.

My brothers and sister and I were brought up in an atmosphere which I would describe as 'Puritan decadence'. Puritanism names the behaviour which is condemned; Puritan decadence regards the name itself as indecent, and pretends that the object behind that name does not exist until it is named.

[Warren Beatty] definitely sees 'Rules' as a comedic consequence to the American sexual puritanism that is dramatically presented in 'Splendor.'

Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.

The puritanism of Christianity has played havoc with the moderation that an enlightened and tolerant critical spirit would have produced. I've noticed that in whatever country, county, town, or other region there is a regulation enjoining temperance, the population seems to be entirely composed of teetotallers and drunkards. There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism, but February.... Spring is too far away to comfort even by anticipation, and winter long ago lost the charm of novelty. This is the very three a.m. of the calendar.

For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.

Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Once one has realized, following the great English literary visionaries William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe, that sexual puritanism, political disciplinarianism, and abuse of the poor are the result of the refusal of true Christianity ... one is led to articulate a more incarnate, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more socialized, even a more 'Platonic' Christianity.

Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.