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Puritanism Quotes

Puritanism Quotes by Leland Ryken, Stephen Spender, Thomas Hooker, Max Weber, Alden Ehrenreich, John Steinbeck and many others.

Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement.
Leland Ryken
My brothers and sister and I were brought up in an atmosphere which I would describe as ‘Puritan decadence’. Puritanism names the behaviour which is condemned; Puritan decadence regards the name itself as indecent, and pretends that the object behind that name does not exist until it is named.
Stephen Spender
Prayer is my chief work, and it is by means of it that I carry on the rest.
Thomas Hooker
Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.
Max Weber
[Warren Beatty] definitely sees ‘Rules’ as a comedic consequence to the American sexual puritanism that is dramatically presented in ‘Splendor.’
Alden Ehrenreich
They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren’t so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people’s property.
John Steinbeck
For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to ‘the low side of their nature.’ Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.
Anais Nin
Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.
Michel Foucault
We won’t dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We’d rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of puritanism and then go home and take a pill.
P. J. O’Rourke
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.
H. L. Mencken
There is a hearty Puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787. It is the work of men who believed in original sin, and were resolved to leave open for transgressors no door which they could possibly shut.
James Bryce
The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
H. L. Mencken
But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit – and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist – and a Catholic.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.
Emma Goldman
Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.
Camille Paglia
The world and you must part, or Christ and you will never meet.
Thomas Brooks
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken
Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You’re on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted.
Diane Lane
One of the strongest features of Puritanism is its autobiographical tendency, its passionate self-regard.
Tom Paulin
‘Memorial Day’ is about ‘spring break’ girls-gone-wild culture which is the seedy underbelly of our American Puritanism, the inverse side of the coin. It’s also about how we forcefully exported that culture and then pretended to not know what we were doing.
Josh Fox
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism, but February…. Spring is too far away to comfort even by anticipation, and winter long ago lost the charm of novelty. This is the very three a.m. of the calendar.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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.
Anais Nin
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is more criticism of puritanism, and more distance from Christian morality, than there has been before.
Susie Bright
The American obliviousness towards the suffering of Palestinians refugees plays a major part in radicalizing people. And we are fanning the flames of puritanism.
Khaled Abou El Fadl
Did you know that Puritanism went hand in hand with dirt, that Oliver Cromwell put a 100 per cent tax on soap and that the repeal of the soap tax was one of the most popular acts of Charles II at his Restoration?
Robertson Davies
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
Joseph Wood Krutch
I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.
Norman Douglas
Many of us grew up with a kind of puritanism against shopping. But shopping can be much more than how it is cast. If you are bored or you have problems, it can be a way of lifting your spirits, by doing something light and superficial. Why not?
Miuccia Prada