Quotes About Salem

John Willard

Among all the freewheeling accusations in 1692, not once had a father accused a son or a son implicated a father.

Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft

Only a small, supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.* He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil.

Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious. It endures in its lessons and our language.

Rebecca Nurse's, Mary Esty's, Elizabeth Procter's, and Mary English's mothers had been rumored to be witches.

Mary Glover, hanged four years earlier on Boston Common for having bewitched the Goodwin children

If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

The three hundredth anniversary of the Salem witch trials of 1692 comes at a time when witchcraft commands a scholarly attention that would have been puzzling in 1892 or even in 1792.

When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the future of forecasting, he said, "When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials."49

Tabitha is classical spinster—similar to Tituba, the Caribbean servant at Salem, Massachusetts, who allegedly taught the spells and charms that led Sarah Good and nineteen others to be burned or hanged for witchcraft. And "Tabitha" would be long associated with single women—tabbies, tabby cats, would become common nineteenth-century single nicknames—and with witches.

I s'pose you know—though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk—what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.

To his colleagues' dismay, Cotton did not completely agree with the others on doctrine, and Hutchinson "did conceive that we were not able ministers of the gospel," the Salem minister Hugh Peter lamented. In sum, "she was a woman not only difficult in her opinions, but also of an intemperate spirit.

When I was a boy in Salem, Mass., in the 1950s, if you wanted to buy a book, you had to take a train to Boston. And when you got there, to a bookstore, there was no such thing as a science-fiction section.

By 1892, enlightenment had progressed to the point where the Salem trials were simply an embarrassing blot on the history of New England. They were a part of the past that was best forgotten: a reminder of how far the human race had come in two centuries.

Rather that being an aberrant expression of North American fears and attitudes about witchcraft, it should be instead be seen as the ultimate expression of it. And therein lies the most alarming aspect of the Salem witch crisis- if Salem is not aberrant then it cannot be comfortably consigned to the past.

ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.

The epicenter of what became known as "rubber fever" was Salem, Massachusetts, north of Boston. In 1825 a young Salem entrepreneur imported five hundred pairs of rubber shoes from Brazil. Ten years later, the number of imported shoes had grown to more than 400,000, about one for every forty Americans

Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World

The Puritans are conventionally considered more "moderate" than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans were no less mad... They forbade Church of England clergy from setting foot in their new American theocracy in Boston and Salem, hung Quakers, and passed a law to hang any Catholic priests who might dare show up.

The girl who was to bloom into a night flower was one of four sisters reared by their mother in Salem, Massachusetts. About the time the war broke out, when she was in her middle teens, Betty Short went to work. She ushered in theaters, she slung plates as a waitress. It was the kind of work where a girl too young and attractive would meet too many men.

Knowledge, and truth, save us from chaos." His tone was quiet, reasonable. And made her want to bite him. "Tempering them with compassion and tolerance makes us human. Without those things, fanatics feed on fear and ignorance. The way they did in Salem, three hundred years ago.

Salem and Portland were founded by New Englanders, the latter named by a native of Portland, Maine, after winning a coin toss with a Bostonian.

The Salem Witchcraft Papers,