Superstitions Quotes - Page 19

• I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps

  Thornton Wilder

  Men, Bird, Nonsense

  Thornton Wilder (2014). “The Ides of March: A Novel”, p.5, Harper Collins

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• Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.

  Russell Kirk

  Men, Decision, Intuition

  Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.38, Regnery Publishing

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• There are, however, some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry — the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.

  Emma Goldman

  Ignorance, Mean, Earth

  Emma Goldman (2012). “Living My Life”, p.207, Courier Corporation

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• I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

  Anne Tyler

  Writing, Thinking, Literature

  Penguin Random House interview, www.penguinrandomhouse.com.

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• Punishment [by Nero] was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.

  Suetonius

  Christian, Men, Class

  Suetonius (1997). “Suetonius: Lives of the Caesars, book V-VIII ; Lives of illustrious men”, Loeb Classical Library

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• A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.

  H. L. Mencken

  Depressing, Prayer, Dark

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.13, Knopf

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• People think I must have all these superstitions, but I don't. I use my batting gloves 'til they wear out. I broke four or five bats during the streak, and I didn't cry over any of them.

  Jimmy Rollins

  Thinking, People, Bats

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• The emptiness and folly of retaliation are apparent from every example which can be brought forward. Not only Jesus Christ, but the most eminent professors of every sect of philosophy, have reasoned against this futile superstition.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Jesus, Philosophy, Example

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1859). “Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources : Now First Printed”, p.269

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• On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Religious, Ignorance

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• Even in an advanced stage of civilization, there is always a tendency to prefer those parts of literature which favor ancient prejudices, rather than those which oppose them; and in cases where this tendency is very strong, the only effect of great learning will be to supply the materials which may corroborate old errors and confirm old superstitions. In our time such instances are not uncommon; and we frequently meet with men whose erudition ministers to their ignorance, and who, the more they read the less they know.

  Henry Thomas Buckle

  Strong, Ignorance, Men

  Henry Thomas Buckle (1913). “History of Civilization in England”

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• Superstition is the irrational belief that an object or behavior has the power to influence an outcome, when there's no logical connection between them. Most of us aren't superstitious - but most of us are a 'littlestitious.'

  Gretchen Rubin

  Connections, Outcomes, Belief

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• Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them.They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.

  Christina Stead

  Men, Primitive Man, Dawn

  Christina Stead (2012). “House of All Nations”, p.122, Open Road Media

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• Jesus Christ opposed with earnest eloquence the panic fears and hateful superstitions which have enslaved mankind for ages.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Jesus, Age, Panic

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1886). “Essays and Letters”

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• Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Wise, Men, Selfishness

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1980). “Shelley on Love: An Anthology”, p.83, Univ of California Press

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• I'm a member of no party. I have no ideology. I'm a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that's all around us.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Party, Struggle, Stupidity

  Source: www.usatoday.com

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• The church is challenging such negative cultural elements as superstition, rugged individualism, materialism, hedonism, permissiveness and utilitarianism.

  Francis Arinze

  Challenges, Church, Negative

  "Arinze Sees Fundamentalism Posing Bar to Interfaith Relations". www.beliefnet.com. December 2001.

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• New York is full of abandoned churches. A Godless city, but full of superstitions on every subject--art, money, sex, food, health.

  Mason Cooley

  Art, Sex, New York

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• It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascinationfor all educated Americans.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Travel, Egypt, Self

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.180, Harvard University Press

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• But, if the knowledge of the occult powers of nature opens the spiritual sight of man, enlarges his intellectual faculties, and leads him unerringly to a profounder veneration for the Creator, on the other hand ignorance, dogmatic narrow-mindedness, and a childish fear of looking to the bottom of things, invariably leads to fetish-worship and superstition.

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Spiritual, Ignorance, Men

  H. P. Blavatsky (2012). “Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology”, p.41, Cambridge University Press

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• Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

  Iain Banks

  Shapes, Reason

  "The State of the Art" by Iain Banks, Night Shade Books paperback edition, (p. 75), 1991.

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• There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: "Let us be friends."

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Children, Athlete, Wrecks

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The Works of Robert G.Ingersoll. [Dresden Ed.]”

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• I detest tradition for tradition's sake; the half-alive; that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions; superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.

  Alfred Stieglitz

  Real, Hatred, Half

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• People in general know not what wickedness there is in this pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they have been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good heavens! It is quite another thing; it is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy.

  Thomas Paine

  Lying, Believe, Book

  Thomas Paine, John P. Kaminski (2002). “Citizen Paine: Thomas Paine's Thoughts on Man, Government, Society, and Religion”, p.52, Rowman & Littlefield

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• All religious systems enslave the mind. Certain things are demanded-certain things must be believed-certain things must be done-and the man who becomes the subject or servant of this superstition must give up all idea of indivuality or hope of intellectual growth or progress.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Religious, Giving Up, Men

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.4281, Library of Alexandria

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• To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Pain, Imagination, Romance

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