Superstition Quotes - page 2

Superstition sets the whole world in flames philosophy quenches them. (Voltaire)
Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public. View quote
Immanuel Kant
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality it strikes at the rootof all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a-begging. View quote
Martin Luther
Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there. View quote
M. Scott Peck
My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two. View quote
David Almond
The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum. View quote
Christopher Lasch
I have a superstition about saying too much about what I want to happen, just in case it all disappears, or someone else comes along and beats me to it. View quote
Gil Gerard
This is indeed a clash of civilisations, not between Islam and Christendom but between reason and superstition. View quote
Polly Toynbee
Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it. View quote
John Adams
Superstition is related to this life, religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, religion to virtue; it is by the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious; it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these desires that we become religious. (Anne Louise Germaine de Staël)
I am an artist, I trade in uncertainty and superstition and cant. I invent dark visions of impossible situations that can never be resolved. View quote
Ralph Steadman
I gave up on this stuff. I gave up on my species and ... I gave up on my countrymen. Because I think we squandered great gifts. I think humans were given great great gifts: walking upright, binocular vision, opposable thumb, large brain ... We grew. We had great gifts, and we gave it all up for both money and God ... We gave it all up to superstition, primitive superstition, primitive shit ... Invisible man in the sky, looking down, keeping track of what we do, make sure we don't do the wrong thing, if we do, he puts us in hell, where we burn forever. That kind of shit is very limiting for this brain we have. So we keep ourselves limited. And then we want a toy and a gizmo and gold and we want shiny things, and we want something to plug in that will make big big big things for us... And all that shit is nothing! It's nothing. View quote
George Carlin
Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it. View quote
André Malraux
This is the great object held out by this association; and the means of attaining it is illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason which will dispell the clouds of superstition and of prejudice. View quote
Adam Weishaupt
Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy of superstition. View quote
Edmund Burke
We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information-not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them. View quote
Karen Blixen
There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme? View quote
Willa Cather
We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition. View quote
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present. (Iain Banks)
Groundless superstition ill becomes an army; Valour is the only deity that rules in the warrior's breast. View quote
Silius Italicus
The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition. View quote
George Herbert
Science that abdicates its cultural values risks being perceived as an extension of technology, an instrument in the hands of political or economic power. Humanity that disavows science risks falling into the hands of superstition. View quote
Nicola Cabibbo
The Sabbath, as now recognized and enforced, is one of the main pillars of Priestcraft and Superstition, and the stronghold of a merely ceremonial Religion. View quote
William Lloyd Garrison