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Quotes About Puritans

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.
~ Garrison Keillor
Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-glass on his high pulpit, the church belfry.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.
~ Joris-Karl Huysmans
America was first colonized by Puritans. Most of our earliest immigrants, and many since, have come here in order to practice their religious beliefs as they please. Our culture has always been, and will most likely always be, profoundly influenced by religion.
~ James Frey
Rhode Island, a colony that the mainstream Puritans denounced as "a cesspool of vile heresies and irreligion
~ Bernard Bailyn
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
~ H. L. Mencken
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
~ H.L. Mencken
the Puritans did not succeed in subduing the purely corporeal part of our human nature, since what they took away from sex they added to gluttony
~ Bertrand Russell
Shortly after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony in the seventeenth century, some Puritans lamented a decline from earlier virtue.
~ Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Shocking many, Puritans wore hats in church (following Jewish practice), refused to bow or kneel during worship (which they saw as a violation of the third commandment), and allowed pigs and chickens in the church, and some of them didn't even know the Lord's Prayer.
~ Eve LaPlante
'Twas founded be th' Puritans to give thanks f'r bein' presarved fr'm th' Indyans, an'… we keep it to give thanks we are presarved fr'm th' Puritans.
~ Finley Peter Dunne
The Puritans gave thanks for being preserved from the Indians, and we give thanks for being preserved from the Puritans.
~ Finley Peter Dunne
Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They wouldn't arrive in America for another decade
~ Bill Bryson
Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it.
~ Bill Bryson
That was before the new puritans took over the city. Before political correctness became the rage and melted all of us into a single amorphous dung heap.
~ G.M. Ford
I am very much in favor of fairy tales. Anxiety-provoking things happen, serious things happen, still there is a happy ending. But you don't have to use fairy tales. Let's have a serious story about the Puritans, one that goes beyond turkeys and Thanksgiving. Why not talk about the fact that the Puritans were so rigid the Dutch couldn't stand them and kicked them out? Speak about how undesirable rigity can be and the need for tolerance.
~ Bruno Bettelheim
The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.
~ Howard Zinn
Puritans, like poachers, shoot to kill your inner bonobo
~ Susan Block
Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.
~ Thomas Pynchon
The highly moralistic and uncompromising outlook of the Puritans eventually put them and their descendants on a collision course with the institution of slavery and produced. among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was called by Abraham Lincoln the little lady who started the Civil War because of her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
~ Thomas Sowell
The distinction between the Pilgrims, those who came to Plymouth between 1620 and 1630, and the Puritans, who came after 1629, initially settling Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut, eventually disappeared as the great wave of Puritan settlers transformed the colony.16
~ Kenneth C. Davis
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
~ Wendell Phillips
No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice.
~ Leland Ryken
the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne