#superstition

You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms. ↗

— Susan Neiman

#religion #superstition #religion

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols! ↗

— Ludwig von Mises

#politics #religion #society #superstition #violence

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#belief #myths #superstition #weakness #nature

Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit. ↗

— Emma Goldman

#emma-goldman #patriotism #superstition #respect

Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell. ↗

— Joe Bageant

#christian #extremism #fundamentalism #ignorance #politics

Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race. ↗

— William Kingdon Clifford

#clog #delivers #every #fatal #help

Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood? ↗

— Judith Viorst

#cost #does #foolish #how #irrational

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth. ↗

— Voltaire

#astronomy #daughter #daughters #dominated #earth

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. ↗

— Voltaire

#human #human mind #imagined #mind #superstitions

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition. ↗

— Jose Bergamin

#doubt #leaves #place #superstition #which