When God Spoke English: The Making of the King James Bible TV - Bertrand Russell - Thomas Babington Macaulay - Philip Stubbs - Frontline: God in America: A New Adam TV - Emma Goldman - H L Mencken - William Shakespeare - G K Chesterton - Alice Morse Earle - Hugh Hefner - Nathaniel Hawthorne - Henry A Beers -
Puritans needed to be central to the process. When God Spoke English: The Making of the King James Bible, BBC 2013
The Recrudescence of Puritanism. Bertrand Russell, title of essay 1928
Persecution produced its natural effect on them [Puritans and Calvinists]. It found them a sect; it make them a faction. Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England
What filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised everywhere in these dancings? It provoketh lust. Philip Stubbs, Puritan
The Puritans fled religious tyranny in the old world to build a more perfect in the new. And how new waves of immigrants demanded their religious freedom. Frontline: God in America: A New Adam, PBS 2010
Puritanism has made life itself impossible. More than art, more than aestheticism, life represents beauty in a thousand variations; it is indeed, a gigantic panorama of eternal change. Puritanism, on the other hand, rests on a fixed and immovable conception of life; it is based on the Calvinistic idea that life is a curse, imposed upon man by the wrath of God. In order to redeem himself man must do constant penance, must repudiate every natural and healthy impulse, and turn his back on joy and beauty. Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays ***** audiobook 6.57.08, part VII
Puritanism no longer employs the thumbscrew and lash but it still has a most pernicious hold on the minds and feelings of the American people. ibid.
Chastity itself is but an artificial imposition upon nature expressive of a false shame of the human form. ibid.
Puritanism is the death of culture. ibid.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. H L Mencken, Chrestomathy, 1949
The dev’l a puritan that he is. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night II iii 141, Maria
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things. Gilbert K Chesterton
Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the seat in which each person should sit during public worship. Alice Morse Earle
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
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 Scarlet Letter
The fact is, there were all kinds of Puritans. There were dismal precisians, like William Prynne, illiberal and vulgar fanatics, the Tribulation Wholesomes, Hope-on-high Bombys, and Zeal-of-the-land Busys, whose absurdities were the stock in trade of contemporary satirists from Johnson to Butler. But there were also gentlemen and scholars, like Fairfax, Marvell, Colonel Hutchinson, Vane, whose Puritanism was consistent with all elegant tastes and accomplishments. Was Milton’s Puritanism hurtful to his art? No and yes. It was in many ways an inspiration; it gave him zeal, a Puritan word much ridiculed by the Royalists; it gave refinement, distinction, selectness, elevation to his picture of the world. But it would be uncritical to deny that it also gave a certain narrowness and rigidity to his view of human life. Henry A Beers, 1920