Puritans quotes:

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It's not a performance to impress the Puritans -- Martin Tyler
Puritans should wear fig leaves on their eyes. -- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth. -- Leland Ryken
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action. -- Wendell Phillips
The God of the Puritans...was a monster too horrible to contemplate. -- John Burroughs
Only Puritans think of the Devil as the most fascinating figure in the universe. -- Heywood Broun
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. -- H. L. Mencken
The Puritans removed organs and paintings from churches, but bought them for private use in their homes. -- Leland Ryken
By all means read the Puritans, they are worth more than all the modern stuff put together. -- Charles Spurgeon
Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you. -- Mignon McLaughlin
Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans' error. -- Tim Powers
He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep. -- Louis Kronenberger
Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-glass on his high pulpit, the church belfry. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Puritans came to America to worship in their way and to force everybody else to do the same thing. -- Sam Levenson
For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life. -- Leland Ryken
Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language. -- Cynthia Ozick
That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans. -- C. S. Lewis
My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time. -- Garrison Keillor
If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, havediscovered only the shores of America. -- Henry David Thoreau
The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building. -- James Russell Lowell
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think. -- H. L. Mencken
The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated. -- Margaret Atwood
Enlist the interests of stern Morality and religious Enthusiasm in the cause of Political Liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Puritans' sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme. -- Leland Ryken
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It [Thanksgiving] was founded by the Puritans to give thanks for bein' preserved from the Indians, an' we keep it to give thanks we are preserved from the Puritans. -- Finley Peter Dunne
The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his. -- Artemas Ward
No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice. -- Leland Ryken
My parents were, had a marriage of passion, and the passion was about their religious beliefs. They were both immigrant families that - well, my father's family came as Puritans to Massachusetts. -- Phil Jackson
We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them. -- Carlisle Floyd
The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne. -- Rebecca West
The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did. -- Gore Vidal
The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads. -- Charles Haddon Spurgeon
America was first colonized by Puritans. Most of our earliest immigrants, and many since, have come here in order to practice their religious beliefs as they please. Our culture has always been, and will most likely always be, profoundly influenced by religion. -- James Frey
Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there. -- Hugh Hefner
I think we're very uptight in America. You have to remember that we're descended from Puritans. Whether or not the country is now composed of immigrants, our culture as American really begins with the landing of the Pilgrims and a puritanical view of things. -- Tom Ford
Underlying the preaching of the Puritans are three basic axioms: 1. The unique place of preaching is to convert, feed and sustain, 2. The life of the preacher must radiate the reality of what he preaches, 3. Prayer and solid Bible study are basic to effective preaching. -- J. I. Packer
...the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Puritans were accustomed to explain faith by the word 'recumbency.' It meant leaning upon a thing. Lean with all your weight upon Christ. It would be a better illustration still if I said, fall at full length, and lie on the Rock of Ages. -- Charles Spurgeon
On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally. -- C. S. Lewis
Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or at the ear. There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or other. The Puritans forgot this, and thrust Beauty out of the meeting-house and slammed the door in her face. -- James Russell Lowell
The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality -- which became America's -- was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect. -- Hugh Hefner
Personally I'm not a feminist, as I can't stand puritans. -- Vivienne Westwood
We must not become the new puritans and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done. -- Barbara Jordan
It is true that the Puritans banned all recreation on Sundays and all games of chance, gambling, bear baiting, horse racing, and bowling in or around taverns at all times. They did so, not because they were opposed to fun, but because they judged these activities to be inherently harmful or immoral. -- Leland Ryken
I don't mind plain women being puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain. -- Oscar Wilde
Why are there so many puritans in this country, and why can't the rest of us make them go away?! -- Bill Maher
That stern and rockbound coast felt like an amateur when it saw how grim the puritans that landed on it were. -- Don Marquis
Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex. -- Mary McCarthy
democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans. ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy. -- Anne Stevenson

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