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Quotes of the Day for 19 July 2011 – Witchcraft
Rebecca Nurse. Susannah Martin. Elizabeth Howe. Sarah Good. Sarah Wildes. Five good women of Salem Village (now Danvers) and Salem, Masachusetts, accused of witchcraft in hysteria amid a community feud, were hanged at Salem on this day in 1692. Their bodies were immediately dumped in a shallow grave without benefit of Christian rites. By the autumnal equinox a total of nineteen women had been hanged, three died in jail, and one man was pressed with heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea and stand trial. The hysteria waned, but it took twenty years before all the convictions were overturned, compensation was paid to the victims' families, and excommunications were vacated.
The quotes:
There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided: 1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772 - 1834
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
- Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1856 - 1941
Such progress we have made! In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me as a witch, but now they are content to burn my book.
- Sigmund Freud, 1856 - 1939
It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.
- Henry Louis Mencken, 1880 - 1956
There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor's yard and stampedes us to burn down this house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.
- Edward R. Murrow, 1908 - 1965
Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today it's called golf.
- Will Rogers, 1879 - 1935
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