Quotes About Puritans

It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwanted jollity that brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year - as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries - 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.

the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly

If something was not in the scriptures, it was a man-made distortion of what God intended. At once radical and deeply conservative, the Puritans had chosen to spurn thousands of years of accumulated tradition in favor of a text that gave them a direct and personal connection to God.

There was little of the religious idealism or of the search for personal freedom that motivated the Pilgrims in 1620 and none of the search to create a "City on a Hill" that spurred the Puritans to take ships for Boston in 1630. To these financial backers, the settlement of Virginia was primarily about trade and money.

A group of Puritans, persecuted in England because of their religion

Indeed. It led to a renaissance," Root says, "like in the seventeenth century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble and then slowly built it back up from scratch.

You got this ship for free!?" "Damn all Puritans and their base obsession with how much it costs!" Roger bellowed, shaking a tiny drumstick at Daniel's brow as if it were the club of Hercules.

I have spent enough time around Puritans in general, and Boston Puritans in particular, to know what these people will tell her: lock up the library! Or

She was, as Lanny had told Esther, a true granddaughter of the Puritans. Her forefathers had sailed in a tiny vessel across a turbulent sea and landed on a cold, inhospitable coast; they had risked their lives for the sake of freedom of conscience. Now Bess was ready to give her happiness for the sake of this new religion which despised religion but which manifested all the symptoms and practiced all the zealotry of those who had received a revelation direct from God.

Four years later the several dozen Leiden ultra-Puritans sailed away from corrupt, contentious Europe for this latest Edenic piece of the New World, to create their New Jerusalem in New England. In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.

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.

Those Puritans would spice the Gallic stew of upper Maine for years, causing no end of trouble to Agnes, who, to be fair, was a witch and a succubus and everything else they ever called her, but that's no excuse for being such poor neighbors, when you think about it.

Puritans had sought to eliminate Christmas mince pies as "idolatry in crust"; the minions of the French Revolution came down hard on bakers who dared term their Epiphany treats "Galette des rois" in honor of the Three Kings. Didn't they know France was now a regicide nation with no time for royalty? "King Cakes" perforce became "Liberty Cakes

By contrast, the subsequent waves of Puritans in their search for profits quickly uprooted all natives and sold many of them into slavery without bothering to extend to them the right to become Christian before being sold or killed.

But what would cause Yankeedom eventually to be so loathed by the other nations was its desire—indeed, its mission—to impose its ways on everyone else. For the Puritans didn't merely believe they were God's chosen people, they believed God had charged each and every one of them to propagate his will on a corrupt and sinful world.

The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his.

How come we got the grumpy boat of bandy-legged Puritans? How come we didn't get the Italian party boat with the cappuccino makers and the gelato machine? That was the sexy boat, man.

The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

The Salem Witchcraft Papers,

by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum.

Os puritanos pensavam que o futuro da igreja repousava num clero distinguido... por um novo fervor, um equipamento intelectual superior, um poder de comunicar... O principal propósito do novo clérigo era comunicar zelo aos leigos, tornando-os capazes de unirem-se para selecionar seus próprios ministros, examinar suas próprias vidas espirituais, dirigir orações em família, ler livros santos e tomar parte na administração eclesiástica.[

I think we're very uptight in America. You have to remember that we're descended from Puritans. Whether or not the country is now composed of immigrants, our culture as American really begins with the landing of the Pilgrims and a puritanical view of things.

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.

No son of mine should ever take the side of the Puritans: that is always an error.