Judith McNaught Quotes
Royce Westmoreland stared at him with biting scorn. "I despise hypocrisy, particularly when it is coated with holiness." "May I ask for a specific example?" "Fat priests," Royce replied, "with fat purses, who lecture staving peasants on the dangers of gluttony and the merits of poverty.
McNaught, Judith. A Kingdom of Dreams. Pocket Books, 1989.
Although Fiorello La Guardia proposed an aggressive reform program for New York City, he did not go far enough for some.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
Some of the founding fathers were deeply religious men while others were not so. Some varied in their believes at different times of their lives, and a number were not very favorable towards orthodox religion. At the time, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches were persecuting other religions throughout Europe and people were still being killed for their “heretical” beliefs. Most important to some of them, kings and other monarchs whom they abhorred, all at the time claimed the Divine Right of Kings and the established churches were the most important support for monarchs. At the time most organized religions were opposed to freedom of conscience and certainly opponents of separation of church and state. American churches tended to take on American values but were never given the chance to dominate the American government they way many religions had in Europe and the rest of the world.
Attila the Hun
Jefferson was not anti-Christian as some accuse him. He was a great admirer of Jesus’ life and philosophy. He did object to the non-ethical aspects of Christianity—the rituals, miracles, dogma, hierarchy, and organized churches. See {611664} . Jefferson even went so far as to compile his own version of the Bible—New Testament sometimes called the “Jefferson Bible”—where he translated the material and then extracted the ethical principles leaving out everything else.
Al-Maarri’s quotations are not only meaningful in their own right, but they illustrate the openness and free thinking that was allowed in the early days of Islam before about 1100. If anyone wrote such things today in most Islamic countries he would at least be jailed if not executed for blasphemy.
In the quoted passage, it describes Diogenes as observing a thief being arrested in one of the religious temples by the officials of the temple. He had pilfered one of the temple treasures. Not unlike modern times, most religious organizations raised money be getting donations from the public. Some of the means of many of the religious groups are and have been of dubious morality and if used in commerce would generally be considered fraud. This quotation shows that this is not a new phenomenon nor was it limited to monotheistic religions.
Millions of people were hungry. There was not enough wheat (they called it corn) to make up for the failed potatoes, and the aristocracy, the landlords, had a very high protective tariff to prevent American wheat from driving the prices down. The aristocrats would not budge on the “corn laws” so Victoria and her government appropriated funds to buy expensive English wheat to distribute to the needy. She also instituted some public employment so the unemployed would, as in the New Deal later, would work on public improvement. However, all administration went through the landlords who took large portions of the corn for the poor to pay themselves for the cost of distributing the corn to the needy. Then many landlords assigned the publicly paid workers to improvement projects on their own personal land. The Queen and Prince were furious and they began an effort that would repeal the Corn Laws and make England a free trading nation.
Judith McNaught is a bestselling author of over a dozen historical and contemporary romance novels, with 30 million copies of her works in print. She was also the first female executive producer at a CBS radio station.
