Quotes About Puritanism

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

The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.

Perhaps our own fin-de-sicle decadence takes the form, not of libertarian excess, but of the kind of over-the-top puritanism we see in political correctness and the assorted moral certainties of physical fitness fanatics, New Agers and animal-rights activists.

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. —H. L. Mencken

The same magnification effect probably explains why some users have found that, for them, LSD is a sexual turn-off, an anaphrodisiac. Under this lens, such persons confront their own negative attitudes toward sex in expanded and enlarged form, and with no possibility of hurrying past them at a blind gallop. If such remnants of puritanism are strong enough, sexual interest is quite overwhelmed by them. This may even be the beginning of a memorable bad trip.

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.

Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.

Puritanism in this the twentieth century is as much the enemy of freedom and beauty as it was when it landed on Plymouth Rock. It repudiates, as something vile and sinful, our deepest feelings; but being absolutely ignorant as to the real functions of human emotions, Puritanism is itself the creator of the most unspeakable vices.

Religion is such an icky, sticky thing, full of tortuous—well, everything. Why is it so essential for man to be forced, for that is what religion relies on, force, to believe in anything but himself? And this is what John Winthrop should represent for us: the utter disdain he and Puritanism have for the self, for the human, for the human being.

Laurence Chaderton, the moderate Puritan leader, once paused after two hours of a Cambridge sermon. The entire congregation stood up and shouted, 'For God's sake go on!' He gave them another hour.

Not for nothing did H. L. Mencken define Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Although Rockefeller never said so outright, one senses that he thought Flagler had become a slave to fashion and ostentation, a traitor to the austere puritanical creed that had united them.

To the puritan all things are impure

One of the strongest features of Puritanism is its autobiographical tendency, its passionate self-regard.

En Inglaterra, o en países puritanos, se entiende. Allí hace falta el sol, que es, sin duda algún, fuente natural de toda felicidad

En Inglaterra, o en países puritanos, se entiende. Allí hace falta el sol, que es, sin duda alguna, la fuente natural de toda alegría. Y como llueve o nieva, no hay adonde ir; ni a las carreras, siquiera

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.

Para estos y otros puritanos, la evangelización era una tarea de la iglesia, en particular de sus ministros, centrada en la Palabra. Ellos entendieron adecuadamente la centralidad de la predicación, el rol del pastor, y la necesidad de la oración en la evangelización

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

Political correctness means nothing to me. Nothing. It's the new Puritanism, darling. Preventing us from expressing ourselves.

'No means no' is puritanism.

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.

because Puritanism is an insatiable vice that feeds off its own shit.

They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.