Carlisle Floyd Quotes

Without really analyzing it, I grew up in Massachusetts, so the Salem witch trials were always something that I was around. The average kindergartner probably doesn't know about it, except that in Massachusetts, you do, because they'll take you on field trips to see reenactments and stuff.

My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!

Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.

When we learned about Salem at school, the whole thing was confusing. Because the idea of the witch hunt is used as a symbol to describe people searching for something that's basically untrue, it cemented in my mind as a kid that witches weren't real.

I think if I had lived back in Salem, I would have been burned at the stake

If there ever was a militant religion, it was that of early New England.

Massachusetts we look at as the home of liberal democracy. In the 16th century, it was the home of repressive theology.

The Diary of Samuel Sewall,' 'The Diary of John Winthrop,' these are easy for anyone to get their hands on. This was really common stuff and there's tons of cases of demon possession.

I don't want to act like the witch trials all over New England were warranted, but when you live in a culture that believes something is real, it feels very real.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

These men were religious when the spirit of religion was buried in forms and ceremonies, and when the priesthood had armed itself with the civil powers to put down all opposition, and suppress all freedom, intellectual, civil, and religious.

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.

Witches were burned and killed in Scotland and England for centuries before what happened in Salem.

Anne Hutchinson’s preaching to both women and men in her home is a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God, nor fitting for her sex.

Whenever the clergy succeeded in conquering political power in any country the result has been disastrous to the interests of religion and inimical to the progress of humanity.

The emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.

During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.....There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed.

Imagine: in the medieval ages, there was no evidence of how the history of mankind has been affected by witchcraft. But there is significant factual history of how brutality and sadism of mankind have been displayed in the most obscene manner in the name of witch-hunt.

The Taliban is the Muslim version of the Salem witch trials.

The three hundredth anniversary of the Salem witch trials of 1692 comes at a time when witchcraft commands a scholarly attention that would have been puzzling in 1892 or even in 1792.

Cotton Mather is one of those classic figures of American history who can't be left out. One has to explain him or explain him away, redeem him or denounce him.

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.

So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there - fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many.

Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.

The people who came to New England, came for freedom of religion. The problem is, freedom of religion to them meant freedom for only their religion