Witchcraft Quotes - Page 5

• I don't care much about politics. That kind of witchcraft I stay away from because people end up dead. I'd rather die for music.

  Cass McCombs

  People, Care, Kind

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• That's something the kids should know about. Reading is a gateway to witchcraft and lesbianism.

  Al Yankovic

  Reading, Kids, Gateways

  "I Love the 90's Part Deux" TV series, VH1 channel, 1998.

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• The important thing is not to do any agriculture whatsoever, and particularly to make the modern agricultural sciences a forbidden area - they're worse than witchcraft, really.

  Bill Mollison

  Agriculture, Important, Modern

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

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• Monetary policy suffers from the unfortunate absence of any occult effect. It has long been clear that economic management...would be greatly facilitated if resort could occasionally be had to witchcraft.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Long, Suffering, Would Be

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• If agricultural land be left uncultivated, in a few years the jungle returns, and signs are not lacking that a similar danger is always lying in wait for the fields of thought, which, by the labour of three hundred years, have been cleared and brought into cultivation by men of science. The destruction of a very small percentage of the population would suffice to annihilate scientific knowledge, and lead us back to almost universal belief in magic, witchcraft and astrology.

  William Cecil Dampier

  Lying, Men, Years

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• Matthew kept hinting that his desire - for blood, chiefly- was so strong that it put everything else at risk. But vampires weren’t the only creatures who had to manage such strong impulses. Much of what qualified as magic was simply desire in action. Witchcraft was different- that took spells and rituals. But magic? A wish, a need, a hunger too strong to be denied- these could turn into deeds when they cross a witch’s mind.

  Deborah Harkness

  Strong, Blood, Risk

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• Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

  Rebecca West

  Father, Years, Waiting

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.36, Open Road Media

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• The nations, and the sects, of the Roman world, admitted with equal credulity, and similar abhorrence, the reality of that infernal art [witchcraft], which was able to control the eternal order of the planets, and the voluntary operations of the human mind. . . . They believed, with the wildest inconsistency, that this preternatural dominion of the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised, from the vilest motives of malice or gain, by some wrinkled hags and itinerant sorcerers, who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt.

  Edward Gibbon

  Art, Reality, Air

  Edward Gibbon (1821). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.253

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• As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.

  John Ruskin

  Ideas, Roots, Astrology

  John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (1964). “The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings”, p.229, University of Virginia Press

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• I am a gluttonous, gorging failure. A waste. My body isn’t used to high-sugar carbs laced with witchcraft. It can barely cope with soup and crackers.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Body, Soup, Sugar

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2009). “Wintergirls”, p.155, Penguin

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• When I consider the Question, Whether there are such Persons in the World as those we call Witches? My Mind is divided between the two opposite Opinions; or rather I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witchcraft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any Particular Instance of it.

  Joseph Addison

  Believe, Opposites, Two

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, Eustace Budgell (1939). “The de Coverley papers”, p.55, Library of Alexandria

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• Pure faith in the benevolece of the Divine can also degenerate into destructive forms of religion like othodoxy, fundamentalism, sectarianism, fanaticism, black magic and witchcraft.

  Nirmala Srivastava

  Yoga, Meditation, Black

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• From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all been for this purpose.

  Matilda Joslyn Gage

  Atheist, Boston, People

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1979). “History of Woman Suffrage”, Ayer Company Pub

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• Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Struggle, Sky, Punishment

  Barbara Ehrenreich (2009). “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America”, p.149, Macmillan

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• I wanted to be a witch when I was a kid. I was obsessed with witchcraft. At school, me and my two friends had these spell books; I always wanted a more magical reality. I had a little shrine at home and I did a spell to try and make the boy in the other class fall in love with me.

  Florence Welch

  Falling In Love, Book, Home

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• Everybody thinks that you go to Africa and you build a school, or you teach English, or you build a hospital. But actually all you need to do is play football with kids for six months and then after they've trusted you, you tell them about the truth of Aids, and that their grandmother didn't die from witchcraft, she died from Aids. And that's the biggest difference you can make.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Football, School, Kids

  "Archipelago - Tom Hiddleston interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• Now, it's common knowledge that most towns of a certain size have a witch, if only to eat misbehaving children and the occasional puppy who wanders into her yard.

  John August

  Children, Big Fish, Yards

  "Fictional character: Edward Bloom". Big Fish, 2003.

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• I'm not over-reacting, but I do think people have to be a bit cautious when they say all kind of activities associated with witchcraft are harmless.

  Peter Hollingworth

  Thinking, People, Kind

  "Witches in Queensland?". "The Religion Report" with John Cleary, www.abc.net.au. December 13, 2000.

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• I can cite a few cases of where people have tampered around with magic and witchcraft that they've been very severely frightened and traumatised by some of the outcomes. I mean we are playing with fire, and I had to say that.

  Peter Hollingworth

  Mean, Fire, People

  "Witches in Queensland?". "The Religion Report" with John Cleary, www.abc.net.au. December 13, 2000.

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• In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem to separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Reflection, Self, Suffering

  Charles Horton Cooley (1992). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.247, Transaction Publishers

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• There is no legitimate use whatsoever for marijuana. This is not medicine. This is bogus witchcraft. It has no place in medicine, no place in pain relief.

  Bob Barr

  Pain, Marijuana, Medicine

  "Barr Booed for Anti-Pot Remarks in Home District Event". Drug War Chronicle, www.stopthedrugwar.org. May 17, 2002.

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• I do not think witchcraft is a religion, and I do not think it is in any way appropriate for the US military to promote it.

  George W. Bush

  Military, Thinking, Scary

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• In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.

  Carl Sagan

  Christian, Atheist, Reality

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.528, Ballantine Books

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• Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?

  David Hume

  Philosophical, Men, Magic

  David Hume (1817). “Philosophical Essays: On Morals, Literature, and Politics”, p.181

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• I understand that unless you have a government of laws, rather than a government of people, you cannot protect dissent. And I understand, as a woman who probably would have been burned in the marketplace for witchcraft only about 200 years ago, that I need the First Amendment more than anybody does. And that even if I am repelled by child pornography or Bob Guccione's productions, that I have to protect those things, because essentially it's in my self-interest to do so.

  Erica Jong

  Children, Government, Self

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