Steve Coogan Quotes
The fundamentalists are insistent that they know best. It's a dictatorial attitude towards personal morality, which is a modern creation that came about in the 19th century.
Coogan, Steve. Interview. The Guardian, Guardian News & Media, 2013.
Many would argue that the situation is the same today, over a hundred years later.
He was referring to governments that imposed some form of morality in their citizens. Free governments do no dictate a morality and require their citizens to follow it. He was very much opposed to Prohibition which he saw as a poor government—Herbert Hoover’s Administration—which was imposing its narrow morality on all. He was very suspicious of government actions where the government claimed that the action was for moral objectives. This is a classic Libertarian view. In general, it is Fundamentalists and ideologues who want to impose their particular morality on all. See {620693} for a related idea.
Reading this quotation, one would think that it was uttered in the early 21st century when the Christian Fundamentalists drove Christian liberals out of many of the evangelical churches and out of the Republican Party. However, this process and conflict has been ongoing for almost a century. This quotation was made in 1922.
Pascal was himself a very religious man, but observed this phenomenon about many religious people.
Stephen John Coogan is an English actor, voice artist, comedian, producer and screenwriter. He began his career in the 1980s as a voice actor on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image and providing voice-overs for television advertisements. In the 1990s, he began creating original characters. In 1999, he co-founded the production company Baby Cow Productions with Henry Normal.
