Superstitions Quotes - Page 11

• Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect.

  Albert Einstein

  Thinking, Views, People

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.323, Princeton University Press

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• For a person to build a rich and rewarding life for himself, there are certain qualities and bits of knowledge that he needs to acquire. But there are also things — harmful attitudes, superstitions, emotions — that he needs to chip away. A person needs to chip away everything that doesn't look like the person he or she most wants to become.

  Earl Nightingale

  Life, Motivational, Attitude

  "How to Completely Change Your Life in 30 Seconds - Part IV".

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• Only if you have some knowledge of the human sacrifices, the vicious temple rites, the degrading superstitions and customs that were practiced . . . can you realize how much the modern world owes to the Hebrew prophets, whose monotheism and moral teachings entered into Christianity and Islam.

  Carlton J. H. Hayes

  Teaching, Sacrifice, Islam

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• Audible prayer can never do the works of spiritual understanding, which regenerates; but silent prayer, watchfulness, and devout obedience enable us to follow Jesus example. Long prayers, superstition, and creeds clip the strong pinions of love, and clothe religion in human forms. Whatever materializes worship hinders man's spiritual growth and keeps him from demonstrating his power over error.

  Mary Baker Eddy

  Love, Spiritual, Jesus

  "Science And Health".

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• The thing with Catholicism, the same as all religions, is that it teaches what should be, which seems rather incorrect. This is what should be. Now, if you're taught to live up to a what should be that never existed - only an occult superstition, no proof of this should be - then you can sit on a jury and indict easily, you can cast the first stone, you can burn Adolf Eichmann, like that!

  Lenny Bruce

  Religion, Stones, Firsts

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• The ideal of a perfectly functioning democracy is one person, one vote; the ideal of a perfectly functioning market is one dollar, one vote.It's a hoary superstition that democratically elected governments invariably function as instruments of the collective will.A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Government, Order, Democracy

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• I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma. We need men like him today more than ever. His writing still inspires us and challenges the 'better angels' of our nature, when people open their hearts and minds to his simple, honest humanity. Thank goodness he was here.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Religious, Memories, Flower

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• If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.

  Ulysses S. Grant

  Ambition, Ignorance, Lines

  Speech to the Society of the Army of Tennessee, archive.org. 1875.

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• In ability choice education finance majorities people understanding voting A lot of voters always cast their ballot for the candidate who seems to them to be one of the people. That means he must have the same superstitions, the same unbalanced prejudices, and the same lack of understanding of public finances that are characteristic of the majority. A better choice would be a candidate who has a closer understanding and a better education than the majority. Too much voting is based on affability rather than on ability.

  William Feather

  Education, Mean, People

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• Success on a cosmic level completely eludes me. I'm deeply suspicious of things being too good. It's part of my superstition, I think, to generate pain in order to give the illusion of gain. I'm not saying I reject success, but honestly, I don't quite know how to deal with it. It's an old feeling: As soon as you have the thing you've been going after all your life, that reasonable degree of security, you start kicking against it, doubting it.

  Hugh Laurie

  Success, Pain, Thinking

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• To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

  William Ralph Inge

  Philosophy, Religion

  Idea of Progress (Romanes Lecture delivered at Oxford, 27 May 1920) p. 9

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• Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.

  Peter Drucker

  Leadership, Knowledge, Mean

  Peter Drucker (2013). “People and Performance”, p.78, Routledge

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• Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?

  Erich Fromm

  Spiritual, Jesus, Revenge

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Escape from Freedom”, p.11, Open Road Media

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• Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.

  James F. Cooper

  Inspirational, Motivational, Ignorance

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• I cherish the fantasy, even the hope, of adventures in other realms to come. But how can we choke out that most precious of all gifts, life, with the rope of religion around our necks? It chokes out freedom with dogma. It pinions us to the stake of superstition.

  Gerry Spence

  Death, Adventure, Necks

  Gerry Spence (2002). “Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom: An Owner's Manual for Life”, p.54, Macmillan

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• Jacobins, I have a truth to tell you. You do not know your most deadly enemies; they are the constitutional priests. It is they who protest most in the provinces against anarchists, disorganisers, Dantonism, Robespierrism, Jacobinism... Do not cherish any longer the popular errors; cut at the roots of superstition! Declare openly that the priests are your enemies.

  Jean-Paul Marat

  Cutting, Errors, Roots

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• It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people. . . . If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with.

  Isaac Asimov

  Running, Horse, Fall

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• Why continue? Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug their superstitions to their breast.

  Isaac Asimov

  Giving Up, Fighting, Winning

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• William Henry Flower the Anglican too praised evolution as a cleansing solvent, dissolving the dross which had 'encrusted' Christianity 'in the days of ignorance and superstition'.

  Adrian Desmond

  Flower, Ignorance, Science

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• Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy of superstition.

  Edmund Burke

  Freedom, Atheism, Anarchy

  Speech 'On Conciliation with America' 22 March 1775

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• People suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is impossible for a person to be cheated by anyone but himself.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Long, People, Suffering

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• You desire a popular art? Begin by having a "people" whose minds are liberated, a people not crushed by misery and ceaseless toil, not brutalized by every superstition and every fanaticism, a people of itself, and victor in the fight that is being waged today.

  Romain Rolland

  Art, Fighting, People

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• I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent. Neither have I so much of the infidel in me, as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils.

  Thomas Paine

  Giving Up, Military, War

  Thomas Paine (2008). “The American Crisis”, p.7, Cosimo, Inc.

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• I recall having read, at the brothers' instance, Madame Blavatsky's Key to Theosophy. This book stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Brother, Book, Keys

  Mahatma Gandhi, General Press (2014). “My Experiments with Truth: An Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi”, p.117, GENERAL PRESS

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• Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often cooly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing in the United States. He deplores the perverse effects of minimum wage laws, and the legal minimum is regularly raised each 3 or 5 years. He brands usury laws as a medieval superstition, but no state hurries to repeal its law.

  George Stigler

  Philosophy, Years, Law

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