Quotes About Quakerism

You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.

Above all, it was the style of Quakerism I was brought up with - an aggressive contempt for popular opinion. The assumption is that most people think something that is wrong, which is great.

In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.

A BASIC TENET OF QUAKERISM WAS THAT IF A MAN or woman tended the divine fire that burned within each human breast, one could establish direct relationship to God without the intercession of priest or rabbi. Songs and shouted prayers were not necessary to attract God's attention, for He dwelt within and could be summoned by a whisper. Nevertheless

Manchester was all mix. It was radical — Marx and Engels were here. It was repressive — the Peterloo Massacres and the Corn Laws. Manchester spun riches beyond anybody's wildest dreams, and wove despair and degradation into the human fabric. It was Utilitarian, in that everything was put to the test of 'Does this work?' It was Utopian — its Quakerism, its feminism, its anti—slavery movement, its socialism, its communism.