“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”

Letter to Robert E. Howard, (October 4, 1930), https://books.google.com/books?id=rVERL_j9UfcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:0809515679&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-beOVeGqHsi_ggT1vqKgCw&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=insanity&f=true
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Robert E. Howard
Context: It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre 'kick', Here is the material for a really profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.... The very pre-ponderance of passionately pious men in the colony was virtually an assurance of unnatural crime; insomuch as psychology now proves the religious instinct to be a form of transmuted eroticism precisely parallel to the transmutations in other directions which respectively produce such things as sadism, hallucination, melancholia, and other mental morbidities. Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity. This was aggravated, of course, by the Puritan policy of rigorously suppressing all the natural outlets of excuberant feeling--music, laughter, colour, pageantry, and so on. To observe Christmas Day was once a prison offence....

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee …" by H.P. Lovecraft?
H.P. Lovecraft photo
H.P. Lovecraft 203
American author 1890–1937

Related quotes

James Allen photo
Robert M. Pirsig photo
Agatha Christie photo
Emily Hahn photo

“I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the chance.”

Emily Hahn (1905–1997) American writer

Saturday Review of Literature, March 26, 1955

“Every group feels strong once it has found a scapegoat.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Habib Bourguiba photo

“Bourguiba on people who patronized the Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct), nightclub- "practice a shameful exhibitionism in morbid and degrading dances."”

Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) Tunisian politician

[Tunisia: Shudder at the Knees, TIME, Friday, Aug. 26, 1966, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,842668,00.html, September 6, 2011]

Rocco Siffredi photo

“Power is the highest expression of perversion.”

Rocco Siffredi (1964) Italian pornographic actor, director, producer and entrepreneur
Pat Condell photo

“Being called close-minded by religious people is a bit like being called yellow by a bunch of bananas.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Take your God and shove him..." (21 August 2008) http://youtube.com/watch?v=M114bK4qaiM
2008

Related topics