Superstitions Quotes - Page 8

• The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder.

  David Hume

  Gazing, Examination, Wonder

  David Hume (2007). “Essays: Moral, Political and Literary”, p.539, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.

  H. L. Mencken

  God, Running, Religious

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.298, Knopf

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• We are so constituted by Nature that we easily believe the things we hope for, but believe only with difficulty those we fear, and that we regard such things more or less highly than is just. This is the source of the superstitions by which men everywhere are troubled. For the rest, I don

  Baruch Spinoza

  Hope, Believe, Men

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• All people have their blind side-their superstitions.

  Charles Lamb

  People, Sides, Blind Side

  Charles Lamb (1839). “Essays of Elia: To which are Added Letters, and Rosamund”, p.32

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• To crush out fanaticism and revere the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to falling prostrate beneath the tree of creation and contemplating its vast ramifications full of stars. We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and to reject the absurd; to admit nothing that is inexplicable excepting what is necessary, to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion, to remove the vermin from the garden of God.

  Victor Hugo

  Crush, Stars, Fall

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• The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Men, Doctors, Medicine

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• Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.

  Learned Hand

  Black, Liberty, Atrocities

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• Superstition is just another form of thought like any other, a form that accentuates and regulates the association of ideas, it's an exacerbation, an illness, but, in fact, all thought is sickness, which is why no one ever thinks too much, at least most people do their best not to.

  Javier Marías

  Thinking, Ideas, People

  Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa (1997). “Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me”, p.217, New Directions Publishing

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• My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go.

  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

  Teaching, People, Democracy

  "Turkey Today" by Grace Ellison, London: Hutchinson, 1928.

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• As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Law, Long, People

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• Deep down am I superstitious? No. Do I believe in trying to be as kind as possible and as compassionate as possible because ultimately you're alone with yourself and your own conscience, and you want that to be as clear as possible? That's not superstition. You have to just try and stay pure and know what you value.

  Nicole Kidman

  Believe, Trying, Want

  FaceBook post by Nicole Kidman from Sep 02, 2016

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• So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Humility, Men, Long

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• Any one who studies the state of things which preceded the French Revolution will see that that tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. And if we ask what then made, and now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints.

  Herbert Spencer

  Life, Men, Errors

  "The Man versus the State: Great Essays".

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• The Conspiracy Theory of Society... [is] a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups - sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from - such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.

  Karl Popper

  Religious, Powerful, War

  "The Open Society and its Enemies: Hegel and Marx".

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• ... the modern state masks itself in moral ideologies which obscure its actual conduct. One of the most compelling and insidious of these ideologies is the doctrine of natural rights. It was to secure these rights that the modern state was invented in the first place, and it is impossible, especially for Americans, not to be seduced by the doctrine. But it is nonetheless a philosophical superstition.

  Donald Livingston

  Philosophical, Rights, Doctrine

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• I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief-in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath.

  Jean Paul

  Fog, Air, Infidelity

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• A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

  Conrad Black

  War, Taken, Quests

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• An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.

  Terry Eagleton

  Self, Improvement, Limitless

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• The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump; the second shuns reason entirely — which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Differences, Enemy, Allies

  Sydney J. Harris (1953). “Strictly personal”

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• We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication .

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Father, Ignorance

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• There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Father, Hypocrite

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• There is... in our day, a powerful antidote to nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times - I mean science. Science cannot be ignored or rejected, because it is bound up with modern technique; it is essential alike to prosperity in peace and to victory in war. That is, perhaps from an intellectual point of view, the most hopeful feature of our age, and the one which makes it most likely that we shall escape complete submersion in some new or old superstition.

  Bertrand Russell

  Powerful, Spring, War

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• This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

  Steven Weinberg

  People, Atheism, Social

  Freethought Today, April 2000.

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• Reason, which is the glory of our nature, is destined eventually, in the progress of future ages, to overturn the empire of superstition.

  Elihu Palmer

  Progress, Age, Empires

  Elihu PALMER (1823). “Principles of Nature; or, a development of the moral causes of Happiness and Misery among the human species”, p.198

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• We must not forget that what I mean by the conquest of the world by spiritual thought is the sending out of the life-giving principles, not the hundreds of superstitions that we have been hugging to our breasts for centuries.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Spiritual, Mean, Giving

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1189, Manonmani Publishers

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