Quotes About Puritanism

S-ar putea s? existe chiar fanatici puritani ai conÅŸtiinÅ£ei care s? doreasc? a muri culcaÅ£i mai degrab? pe un Nimic cert decât pe un Ceva nesigur. Dar acesta e nihilism, însemnul unui suflet dezn?d?jduit ÅŸi dezgustat de moarte, oricât de curajoase ar p?rea atitudinile unei astfel de virtuÅ£i.

religion, the most powerful of the elements which have entered into the formation of moral feeling, having almost always been governed either by the ambition of a hierarchy, seeking control over every department of human conduct, or by the spirit of Puritanism.

She had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was most important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship.

Social control through consumerism might have been more benign than through more totalitarian methods, but it set up different kinds of distortions that were increasingly enacted in the deep oscillation between hedonism and puritanism.

la extinción del deseo no es sólo el ideal de santurrones puritanos, sino de personas que han reflexionado mucho sobre la condición humana, como los budistas.

Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn't seek them, there would be no people.

The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it.

The practical objection to Puritanism, as to every form of fanaticism, is that it singles out certain evils as so much worse than others that they must be suppressed at all costs. The fanatic fails to recognise that the suppression of a real evil, if carried out too drastically, produces other evils which are even greater.

Her detractors, starting with her neighbor John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, derided her as the "instrument of Satan," the new Eve, and the "enemy of the chosen people." In summing her up, Winthrop called her "this American Jezebel"—the emphasis is his—making an epithet of the name that any Puritan would recognize as belonging to the most evil and shameful woman in the Bible.

It would be safe to say that by the nineteenth century, pietism had long since dislodged Puritanism as the dominant force in American religious life.

These beliefs were mainly Protestant but not yet petty middle-class puritanism: there remained still an element fairly high stepping and wide gestured in its personal conduct. The petty middle class of fundamentalists who saw no difference between wine-drinking, dancing, card-playing, and adultery, had not yet got altogether the upper hand in that part of the country - in fact, never did except in certain limited areas; but it was making a brave try.

Muslim-majority countries plagued by religious puritanism, by sexual sickness, by smothered invention.

Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement.

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

Hester, in the dark conclusion of Hawthorne's brooding novel, reassumes the Puritan mantle….Hawthorne thus captures the catch-22 of feminism: the very woman who is able to envision a new order of living is, by the same token, unable, since the passion that enables her also adulterates her in the eyes of the Puritans. Released from goodness, she is imprisoned in badness, within the framework of the puritanical order. But her mind is free to question the order.

Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. —H. L. Mencken (1949)

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

Americans had to tie every radical aspiration into a puritanical knot.

But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life!

the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up.

En la posterioridad inmediata, la generación siguiente a la de los primeros emigrantes mostró la tonalidad más negra del puritanismo, y de tal manera oscurecía con ella el rostro de la nación, que todos los años siguientes no han sido suficientes para limpiarlo. Tenemos que volver a aprender el arte olvidado de la alegría.

dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World