Puritan Legacy Quotes

The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality - which became America's - was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect.

We deny in the most positive language that this is an Anglo-Saxon nation. We deny that England is the mother country, and we deny that the great progress and achievements of this country have been brought about solely through the efforts and influence of the Puritans.... All Europe is our mother, not England.

The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building.

Puritan standards have become the public standards of America, and you will find more of New England in Colorado Springs, Boulder, or Greeley than in most towns of Massachusetts.

The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession.

They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.

It’s true the Puritans themselves fled intolerance, but once they established themselves in America, they set up their own brutally intolerant regime.

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.

You can't understand America without understanding the Puritans. In many ways, we're still living out their legacy in ways that are good and bad.

What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.

For sheer cruelty our old Puritan ancestors can hardly be beaten.

Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.

I'm always disappointed when I see the word 'Puritan' tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to Hell.

After all the Puritans came to America to escape from persecution and then turned around and started persecuting other people. So I understand that conflict that we have related to play and pleasure and sexuality. And I think what has made my life worthwhile is trying to deal with some of those questions.

It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is 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.