
“To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.”
Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932)
A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Lane Company (1916) p. 76
1910s
“To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.”
Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932)
“A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”
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.”
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.”
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
1850s
Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), New England Two Centuries Ago
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.”
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.