Superstitions Quotes - Page 27

• Religious superstitions more than all other influences put together cripple & enslave woman, but so long as women themselves do not see it & hug their chains, we have a great educational work to do.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Religious, Educational, Long

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• The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Philosophy, Men, Political

  Vladimir Il'ich Lenin (1975). “Izbrannye Proizvedenii͡a V Trekh Tomakh”

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• I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - [...] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

  Carl Sagan

  Children, Hands, America

  "A Disturbing 1995 Prediction by Carl Sagan Accurately Describes America of Today" by PAUL RATNER, bigthink.com.

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

  Susan Neiman

  People, Needs, May

  Susan Neiman (2009). “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists”, p.132, Random House

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• But superstition, like belief, must die.

  Philip Larkin

  Belief, Dies

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.49, Faber & Faber

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• Superstition originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  People, Miracle, Devil

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• Ah, yes, superstition: it would appear to be cowardice in face of the supernatural.

  Theophrastus

  Faces, Cowardice

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• It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Branches, Assuming, Characteristics

  Ludwig Von Mises (1962). “The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method”

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• We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Moon, Views, Ties

  "Eight Little Piggies". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "A Foot Soldier for Evolution", p. 441, 1993.

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• And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. The superstition of the people was not embittered theological rancor.

  Edward Gibbon

  Religious, People, Rancor

  Edward Gibbon (2013). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: The Modern Library Collection (Complete and Unabridged)”, p.19, Modern Library

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• Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.

  Randall Jarrell

  Country, Confused, Passion

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "The Development of Yeats's Sense of Reality" (p. 89), 1980.

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• The phenomenon of dreaming ... helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dream, Spiritual, Men

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (Illustrated)”, p.1698, Delphi Classics

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• "Natural" is a very dangerous word to use about sexuality ... Our society's notions of normality are completely fake and meta-trendy, since they rely on the changing standards of superstition, religion, Christianity and gender bias to define themselves. Americans, in particular, exhibit very childish reactions to sexual practices that are new to them, much like little kids who are offered a vegetable they haven't seen before: "That's disgusting!" "But darling, you haven't even tried it!" "I don't care, I hate it, I hate it!

  Susie Bright

  Hate, Kids, Gender Bias

  "Nothing But the Girl" by Susie Bright, (Introduction), 1996.

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• My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

  David Almond

  Two, Wavering, Boundaries

  "A hit from a myth" by Kit Spring, www.theguardian.com. November 22, 2003.

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• People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

  D. A. Carson

  Prayer, Thinking, Self

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• Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Clever, Fear, Men

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1991). “The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, 1961: There Is No Thinker, Only Thought”, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company

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• Intuitive seeming is in my view an attraction to assent based on nothing more than understanding of the content that upon consideration attracts one's assent. But such understanding-based attraction can differ dramatically in epistemic quality. Some such attractions represent nothing more than superstition or bias absorbed from the culture, sans ratiocination.

  Ernest Sosa

  Views, Understanding, Quality

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Superstition moulds nature into an arbitrary semblance of the supernatural, and then bows down to the work of its own hands.

  John Sterling

  Hands, Arbitrary, Bows

  John Sterling (1848). “Essays and Tales: Fragments from the travels of Theodore Elbert. Thoughts. Tales and apologues”, p.128

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• In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

  Hypatia

  Fighting, Men, Views

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• The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.

  Jerry A. Coyne

  War, Battle, Evolution

  Jerry A. Coyne (2009). “Why Evolution is True”, p.11, Oxford University Press, USA

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• There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them.

  Isak Dinesen

  Religious, Real, Thinking

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• The world was sick, and the ills from which it was suffering were mainly due to the perversion of man, his inability to live at peace with himself. The microbe was no longer the main enemy; science was sufficiently advanced to be able to cope with it admirably. If it were not for such barriers as superstition, ignorance, religious intolerance, misery and poverty.

  Brock Chisholm

  Religious, Ignorance, Men

  "Public health, a progressive science". Monthly Bulletin of the Philippine Health Service, 24, 1948.

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• Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations.

  George Sarton

  Appreciation, People, Greek

  George Sarton (2012). “Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece”, p.9, Courier Corporation

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• Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which, Nature never pardons.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Failure, Luck, Steps

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2014). “The Portable Emerson”, p.340, Penguin

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• fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.

  Marya Mannes

  Fear, Bogs, Dogma

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