#puritanism

Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism. ↗

— Emma Goldman

#chained #greatest #hounded #imprisoned #nevertheless

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed. ↗

— Emma Goldman

#entire #everything #expression #fabric #germ

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

#around #board #came #england #escape

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. ↗

— H. L. Mencken

#fear #happy #haunting #may #puritanism

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February. ↗

— Joseph Wood Krutch

#brought #charge #england #february #most

In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact. ↗

— Marlene Dietrich

#morality #obsession #prudishness #puritanism #sexuality

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility. ↗

— Anaïs Nin

#fear #freedom #hypocrisy #literature #perversion

Nothing evokes the prurient like puritanism. ↗

— Christopher Moore

#wit #witty #witty

About these developments George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, was quite wrong. He described a new kind of state and police tyranny, under which the freedom of speech has become a deadly danger, science and its applications have regressed, horses are again plowing untilled fields, food and even sex have become scarce and forbidden commodities: a new kind of totalitarian puritanism, in short. But the very opposite has been happening. The fields are plowed not by horses but by monstrous machines, and made artificially fertile through sometimes poisonous chemicals; supermarkets are awash with luxuries, oranges, chocolates; travel is hardly restricted while mass tourism desecrates and destroys more and more of the world; free speech is not at all endangered but means less and less. ↗

— John A. Lukacs

#george-orwell #orwell #prophecy #puritanism #food

There is more criticism of puritanism, and more distance from Christian morality, than there has been before. ↗

— Susie Bright

#before #christian #criticism #distance #morality