Quotes About Superstition

Throughout history we witness continual cycles of rising and falling levels of the irrational. The great golden age of Pericles, with its philosophers and its first stirrings of the scientific spirit, was followed by an age of superstition, cults, and intolerance. This same phenomenon happened after the Italian Renaissance. That this cycle is bound to recur again and again is part of human nature.

He felt a sudden exultation in his singularity. Well, damn the world for its superstition.

You are a bird of ill-omen, thought Kelso. You circle the world and wherever you land there is famine and death and destruction: in an earlier and less credulous age, the local citizens would have gathered at the first sight of you and driven you off with stones -

I think, by the way, that's why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on wearing a pair of dirty socks, you're less likely to think it has to do with your technique. If it's technique, you think about it. If it's your socks, it's not rational. What superstitions do for the athlete is to irrationalize. And that's what you have to do as a writer; you have to irrationalize yourself somehow.

But I believe I rather like superstitious people. They lend color to life. Wouldn't it be a rather drab world if everybody was wise and sensible . . . and good? What would we find to talk about?

The gods, so says the old superstition, do not like to behold too happy mortals. It is certain, at least, that some human beings do not.

I told you it was a backwoods. They probably still practice corn sacrifice.

I could hear the cicadas like a vortex of hundreds of tiny violins. I'd always hated them, too. Anytime cicadas showed up, bad juju lurked nearby.

Can it really be said that before the day of our pretentious science, humanity was composed solely of imbeciles and the superstitious?

Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.

Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science.

This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

A patient had a 50-50 chance of benefiting from visiting a physician as of 1910. Medicine was more like voodoo than science until the 20th Century.

[All religious sects] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight; and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies in which they live.

As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.

Astrology is a disease, not a science.

Preachers dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight.

Laws should be made, not against quacks but against superstition.

William Henry Flower the Anglican too praised evolution as a cleansing solvent, dissolving the dross which had 'encrusted' Christianity 'in the days of ignorance and superstition'.

The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness.

Astrology is a cousin of racism.

When superstitions enter the world of imagination, then intelligence and science become fiction.

Magic is an ancient practice that has power over superstitious mind.

If a black black cat crosses your path, it suggests that the animal is going somewhere.