Protestant Ethic Quotes

#1. The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.

Paul Goodman

#2. Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.

John Carroll

#3. Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?

Niall Ferguson

#4. We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#5. Whether you practice a traditional religion or a universal version of spirituality, it is necessary to keep an open mind for learning and growing.

Thomas Vazhakunnathu

#6. I do say no to lots of things, actually! I know it doesn't look like it. But I have a tendency to a) be rubbish at saying no, and b) be pushed by some kind of Protestant work ethic.

Jo Brand

#7. If you can't win by reason, go for volume.

Bill Watterson

#8. Money is of a prolific generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more.

Benjamin Franklin

#9. I've worked hard, every single day since I left school. I think I have a Protestant work ethic.

Elvis Costello

#10. There are those who will seek to block you. There are also non-physical forces. To win in the world of enlightenment, it is necessary to be able to will away these forces, to see they're insubstantial.

Frederick Lenz

#11. It is a perverse faith, in that it reveres the "environment" ahead of people who live in it. It is a most ascetic superstition, in that it demands we live less happily and less freely and with less prosperity - the opposite of, say, the Protestant work ethic that helped build Ontario.

Ezra Levant

#12. I suppose all of us - we have the old Protestant work ethic of feeling guilty when you're not working, and getting a buzz from feeling like you're really busy. That's the reason to sort of carry on.

Jonny Greenwood

#13. He's not going to shoot us in the back by accident, is he?" Deputy Coltrain asked. I smiled, not sweetly. "He promised not to.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#14. When you're a cartographer, having to make maps sort of comes with the territory.

Jarod Kintz

#15. Nobody else in the world would look at writing as craftsmanship - it's totally this Protestant hardworking ethic. You go into this kind of infinite space of imagination and you fence yourself in with all kinds of laws.

Etgar Keret

#16. I would say that Catholics came in and competed with the Protestant work ethic. That is one thing. And they did assimilate into the broader society and a lot of them, especially Irish Catholic did their best to sound like they were English rather than Irish by dropping and the O and the apostrophe.

Steve King