“To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.”
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter
Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932)
“At the bottom of Puritanism one finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world, and hence hatred of him. At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This is why all Puritans are democrats and all democrats are Puritans.”
A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Lane Company (1916) p. 76
1910s
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H.L. Mencken281
American journalist and writer 1880–1956Related quotes
Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years
Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 330)
“A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist
As quoted in an interview in The New York Times (21 November 1930)
“Like all neo-puritans you have a mind like an open drain.”
John Brunner book The Jagged Orbit
Source: The Jagged Orbit (1969), Chapter 44, “A Firm Decision to Go Into the Wagon-Fixing Business in a Big Way” (p. 132)
“What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.”
Wendell Phillips (1811–1884) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator and lawyer
Speech at the dinner of the Pilgrim Society (21 December 1855), published in Speeches, Letters and Lectures by Wendell Phillips https://archive.org/details/speecheslectures7056phil (1884), p. 229 <br class="br">1850s
“Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night
Source: Tender Is the Night
James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat
Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), New England Two Centuries Ago
Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer
As quoted in "Lady with a Switchblade" in LIFE magazine (20 September 1963) http://books.google.com/books?id=e1IEAAAAMBAJ&q=%22Europeans+used+to+say+Americans+were+puritanical+Then+they+discovered+that+we+were+not+puritans+So+now+they+say+that+we+are+obsessed+with+sex%22&pg=PA62#v=onepage
“The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.”
H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer
Source: 1910s, Prejudices, First Series (1919), Ch. 16
Context: The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y. M. C. A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)