Words matter. These are the best Puritans Quotes from famous people such as Leland Ryken, Edmund Morgan, Carlisle Floyd, Yasmine Hamdan, Pete Buttigieg, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The Puritans removed organs and paintings from churches, but bought them for private use in their homes.
The Puritans’ sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme.
The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession.
We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn’t. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them.
For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life.
The Arab world is mediatised in a way that gives too much space to these people – puritans, extremists, whatever you want to call them. There are a lot more people like me in the Middle East than you might think.
You can’t understand America without understanding the Puritans. In many ways, we’re still living out their legacy in ways that are good and bad.
I think we’re very uptight in America. You have to remember that we’re descended from Puritans. Whether or not the country is now composed of immigrants, our culture as American really begins with the landing of the Pilgrims and a puritanical view of things.
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
America was first colonized by Puritans. Most of our earliest immigrants, and many since, have come here in order to practice their religious beliefs as they please. Our culture has always been, and will most likely always be, profoundly influenced by religion.
No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice.
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.
The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth.
There are no French Puritans.
My parents were, had a marriage of passion, and the passion was about their religious beliefs. They were both immigrant families that – well, my father’s family came as Puritans to Massachusetts.
We must not become the new puritans and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.
The society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
Personally I’m not a feminist, as I can’t stand puritans.
Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.
It is true that the Puritans banned all recreation on Sundays and all games of chance, gambling, bear baiting, horse racing, and bowling in or around taverns at all times. They did so, not because they were opposed to fun, but because they judged these activities to be inherently harmful or immoral.
The Puritans left behind so full a record of what they thought and did that scholars cannot resist the temptation to make the most of it.
Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.
