Superstitions Quotes - Page 11

• Superstition has been defined as the use of a form whose significance has been forgotten.

  Dion Fortune

  Use, Forgotten, Form

  Dion Fortune (2000). “The Training & Work of an Initiate”, p.88, Weiser Books

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• It is only in times of social dissolution, as in the last age of the small Semitic states, when men and their gods were alike powerless before the advance of the Assyrians, that magical superstitions based on mere terror, or rites designed to conciliate alien gods, invade the sphere of tribal or national religion. In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.

  William Robertson Smith

  Men, Age, May

  William Robertson Smith (1889). “Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: First Series. The Fundamental Institutions”

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• As long as superstition and ignorance prevail, humanity will fall short of eradicating war, poverty, and hunger.

  Jacque Fresco

  War, Fall, Ignorance

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• Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden.

  Jean-Francois de La Harpe

  Men, Beast, Burden

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• Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native [sic] Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture.

  Bryan Fischer

  Christian, Light, Darkness

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• The best society, the best human existence, arrives when humans most closely determine the truth, and act on the truth, and separate it from superstition, falsity, or misinformation. And there is no better system for determining the truth than free speech: Testing the validity of an idea in the waters of public discussion and debate.

  Dave Rodgers

  Truth, Ideas, Water

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• Out of abysses of Illiteracy, Through labyrinths of Lies, Across wastelands of Disease . . . We advance Out of dead-ends of Poverty, Through wilderness of Superstition, Across barricades of Jim Crowism . . . We advance.

  Melvin B. Tolson

  Lying, Labyrinth, Deceit

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• The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump; the second shuns reason entirely — which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Differences, Enemy, Allies

  Sydney J. Harris (1953). “Strictly personal”

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• An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.

  Terry Eagleton

  Self, Improvement, Limitless

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• A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

  Conrad Black

  War, Taken, Quests

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• I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief-in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath.

  Jean Paul

  Fog, Air, Infidelity

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• ... the modern state masks itself in moral ideologies which obscure its actual conduct. One of the most compelling and insidious of these ideologies is the doctrine of natural rights. It was to secure these rights that the modern state was invented in the first place, and it is impossible, especially for Americans, not to be seduced by the doctrine. But it is nonetheless a philosophical superstition.

  Donald Livingston

  Philosophical, Rights, Doctrine

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• The Conspiracy Theory of Society... [is] a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups - sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from - such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.

  Karl Popper

  Religious, Powerful, War

  "The Open Society and its Enemies: Hegel and Marx".

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• Any one who studies the state of things which preceded the French Revolution will see that that tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. And if we ask what then made, and now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints.

  Herbert Spencer

  Life, Men, Errors

  "The Man versus the State: Great Essays".

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• So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Humility, Men, Long

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• We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication .

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Father, Ignorance

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• Superstition is just another form of thought like any other, a form that accentuates and regulates the association of ideas, it's an exacerbation, an illness, but, in fact, all thought is sickness, which is why no one ever thinks too much, at least most people do their best not to.

  Javier Marías

  Thinking, Ideas, People

  Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa (1997). “Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me”, p.217, New Directions Publishing

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• Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.

  Learned Hand

  Black, Liberty, Atrocities

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• Excessive attention to the minutiae of astrology is one of the superstitions which has hurt the Hindus very much.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Hurt, Astrology, Attention

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.3648, Manonmani Publishers

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• Without [hope and] confidence in a cause, there is no action. Ignorance may be enlightened, superstition wiped out; intolerance may become tolerant, and hate be changed into love; ideas may be quickened, intelligence widened, and men's hearts may be ennobled; but from pessimism which can see nothing but gloomy visions nothing is to be expected.

  Klas Pontus Arnoldson

  Hate, Heart, Ignorance

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• The fact is that we have many superstitions, many bad spots and sores on our body - these have to be excised, cut off, and destroyed - but these do not destroy our religion, our national life, our spirituality. Every principle of religion is safe, and the sooner these black spots are purged away, the better the principles will shine, the more gloriously. Stick to them.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Cutting, Shining, Black

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1191, Manonmani Publishers

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• We must not forget that what I mean by the conquest of the world by spiritual thought is the sending out of the life-giving principles, not the hundreds of superstitions that we have been hugging to our breasts for centuries.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Spiritual, Mean, Giving

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1189, Manonmani Publishers

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• All people have their blind side-their superstitions.

  Charles Lamb

  People, Sides, Blind Side

  Charles Lamb (1839). “Essays of Elia: To which are Added Letters, and Rosamund”, p.32

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• We are so constituted by Nature that we easily believe the things we hope for, but believe only with difficulty those we fear, and that we regard such things more or less highly than is just. This is the source of the superstitions by which men everywhere are troubled. For the rest, I don

  Baruch Spinoza

  Hope, Believe, Men

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• Reason, which is the glory of our nature, is destined eventually, in the progress of future ages, to overturn the empire of superstition.

  Elihu Palmer

  Progress, Age, Empires

  Elihu PALMER (1823). “Principles of Nature; or, a development of the moral causes of Happiness and Misery among the human species”, p.198

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