Quotes About Quakers

Amy and Isaac Post

Our Quakers love us. We're big with the Quakers. It's all about cleanliness.

James Jackson actually made menacing faces at the Quakers in the gallery, calling them outright lunatics, then launched into a tirade so emotional and incoherent that reporters in the audience had difficulty recording his words.

Should slavery be abolished there, (and it is an event, which, from these circumstances, we may reasonably expect to be produced in time) let it be remembered, that the Quakers will have had the merit of its abolition.

It was about the end of December, 1857, or the beginning of January, 1858, when we reached Cedar county, the journey thus consuming about a month of time. We stopped at a village called Springdale, in that county, where in a settlement principally composed of Quakers, we remained.

For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.

They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.

Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733.

I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently... This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.

[It was] Justice Bennet of Derby, who was the first that called us Quakers, because we bid them tremble at the word of the Lord. This was in the year 1650.

They're really good people. Quakers are always to be found where they're most needed.

I'm not the heroic type, really. I was beaten up by Quakers.

Even if Nantucket's Quakers dominated the island economically and culturally, room was made for others, and by the early nineteenth century there were two Congregational church towers bracketing the town north and south. Yet all shared in a common, spiritually infused mission—to maintain a peaceful life on land while raising bloody havoc at sea. Pacifist killers, plain-dressed millionaires, the whalemen of Nantucket were simply fulfilling the Lord's will.

In general, Quakers did not give gifts, as material possessions should not be given heightened status.

Quakers never haggled, but set what they felt was a fair price for materials and labour. Each product had what was thought of as its own intrinsic merit, be it a carrot or a horseshoe or a quilt, and that did not change simply because many people needed a horseshoe.

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.

At the Quarterly Meeting in December 1777 the Quakers of the Choptank became the first important religious group in the south to outlaw slavery among its members.

Could the peaceable principle of the Quakers be universally established, arms and the art of war would be wholly extirpated: But we live not in a world of angels...I am thus far a Quaker, that I would gladly agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket and thank Heaven He has put it in my power.

Ivan couldn't think of a religion that was any damn good at making utter truthtellers out of its practitioners. Maybe the Quakers were truly plainspoken at one time, but even they managed to squeeze out a Richard Nixon after a few hundred years of suppressing their human propinquity for untruth.

Quakers almost as good as colored. They call themselves friends and you can trust them every time.

Interpreting De Waal in religious terms, I would argue that morality does not amount to a codified set of behaviour dictated by a God 'out there', but is an instinctive response to 'that of God' (as the Quakers put it) within each of us.

The report helpfully provided that Quakers are a religious group that pride themselves on their nonviolent beliefs. That was a stupid principle on which to found a religion, Chung-Cha thought. One could not rule out violence, because violence was often necessary. And since other religions routinely employed violence, those that did not were in constant danger of being rendered extinct.

Laclos thought, how about a one-way ticket to Pennsylvania? You'd enjoy life among the Quakers. Alternatively, how about a nice dip in the Seine?

The artistry of dialogue lies in experiencing the flow of meaning and seeing the one thing that needs to be said now. Like the Quakers, who enjoin members to say not simply whatever pops into their heads but only those thoughts that are compelling (and which cause the speaker to quake from the need to speak them)