Top 100 Quotes About Superstition
#1. Superstition though does tend to have a sharp end, and I didn't want to find myself impaled on it.
Mark Lawrence
#2. Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.
John Dewey
#3. We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#4. A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions.
Gertrude Atherton
#5. There is but one thing that can free a man from superstition, and that is belief. All history proves it. The most sceptical have ever been the most credulous.
George MacDonald
#6. Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?
Robert G. Ingersoll
#7. Patriotism is a superstition, one far more injurious, brutal and inhumane than religion.
Gustave Herve
#8. On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.
H.L. Mencken
#9. Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power.
David McCullough
#10. What is destiny - a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the seemingly benign verso of fate.
Joyce Carol Oates
#11. A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw
#12. Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden.
Jean-Francois De La Harpe
#13. Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native [sic] Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture.
Bryan Fischer
#14. I am an artist, I trade in uncertainty and superstition and cant. I invent dark visions of impossible situations that can never be resolved.
Ralph Steadman
#15. Growth of the soil was something different, a thing to be procured at any cost; the only source, the origin of all. A dull and desolate existence? Nay, least of all. A man had everything; his powers above, his dreams, his loves, his wealth of superstition.
Knut Hamsun
#16. In the world order, if the nagual dominates and not the tonal, then we'll live in times of fear and superstition.
Frederick Lenz
#17. The modern drama, operating through the double channel of dramatist and interpreter, affecting as it does both mind and heart,is the strongest force in developing social discontent, swelling the powerful tide of unrest that sweeps onward and over the dam of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition.
Emma Goldman
#19. What did I fear, and why? - I, to whom the night had been
a more familiar face
than that of man
I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm!
Ambrose Bierce
#20. I am not given to superstition, yet there are certain places in old Asian countries where human beings have been born and have lived and died for so many generations that the very earth is saturated with their flesh and the air seems crowded with their continuing presence.
Pearl S. Buck
#21. I beg you to believe the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or frustrateor of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.
Carl Jung
#23. Religion glorifies the dogma of a despotic, mythical God. Atheism ennobles the interests of free and progressive Man. Religion is superstition. Atheism is sanity. Religion is medieval. Atheism is modern.
E. Haldeman-Julius
#24. Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.
Richard Whately
#25. Should we tolerate the blatant incorrectness of religion? Tolerating ignorance, superstition and stupidity will not provide for a healthy advancement of our society. Religion is cancer for modern thought, rationality, and even common sense.
Odin Zeus McGaffer
#26. Like it or not, we're still a primitive tribe ruled by fears, superstition and misinformation.
Bill Maher
#27. Doubt is a powerful tool. Doubt challenges my beliefs and breaks the spell of all the lies and superstitions that control my world. I use doubt to recover faith in myself, to take my power back from every superstition I believe in, and return that power to myself.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
#28. The greatest burden in the world is superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home.
John Milton
#29. The mountain of superstition has to be leveled for our people to taste a fresh breath of life in Christ Jesus.
Sunday Adelaja
#30. To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
William Ralph Inge
#31. Total victory is the only acceptable goal in a mind-control war because humanity is diminished so long as a single mind remains trapped in superstition [supernatural religion] by programming or choice.
Howard Thompson
#32. Thought is a primitive superstition. Reason is an irrational idea.
Ayn Rand
#33. I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions - and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.
Claire Scovell LaZebnik
#34. Superstition originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#35. The ruin of Paganism, in the age of Theodosius, is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition; and may therefore deserve to be considered, as a singular event in the history of the human mind.
Edward Gibbon
#37. Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.
Henry James
#39. He was allying himself to science, for what was science but the absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money? His life would be full of machinery, which was the antidote to superstition ...
Henry James
#40. It is not the New Inquisition which is our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege. It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes use of Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep's clothing.
Upton Sinclair
#42. You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.
Susan Neiman
#43. Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse; clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
Walter Lippmann
#44. Superstition is another word for Everyday life.
Lionel Suggs
#45. What pity that Religion and Love, which heighten our relish for the things of both worlds, should ever run the human heart into enthusiasm, superstition, or uncharitableness!
Samuel Richardson
#46. The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.
Voltaire
#47. The truly pious must negotiate a difficult course between the precipice of godlessness and the marsh of superstition.
Plutarch
#48. 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
#49. I cherish the fantasy, even the hope, of adventures in other realms to come. But how can we choke out that most precious of all gifts, life, with the rope of religion around our necks? It chokes out freedom with dogma. It pinions us to the stake of superstition.
Gerry Spence
#50. In every age its (liberty's) progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food
Lord Acton
#51. Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. 'Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.'24
Richard J. Evans
#52. Every country has a cultural legacy and religious practices for reasons that I don't believe fall under the category of superstition, something that a religious scholar should understand.
Santosh Kalwar
#53. Clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.
Carl Sagan
#54. Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.
Russell Kirk
#55. The master of superstition, is the people; and in all superstition, wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.
Francis Bacon
#56. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
James Madison
#58. Atheism deprives superstition of its stand ground, and compels Theism to reason for its existence.
George Holyoake
#59. The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#60. One of the greatest obstacles I see to our fashioning a rational approach to spirituality is to have religious superstition and self-deception masquerade as science.
Sam Harris
#61. The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
Doris Lessing
#63. Meditation is a science, not a superstition. Meditation
Osho
#65. Superstition is a quality that seems indigenous to the ocean.
James F. Cooper
#66. The nations were awakened from the sleep of death, as the words of eternal life flowed from the Apostles' lips, - the temples of superstition were shut or destroyed, and churches were planted in every part of the civilized world.
John Strachan
#69. Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.
Federico Fellini
#70. I'm an atheist swimming in a sea of superstition, surrounded by well-meaning, good people with whom I share a culture and similar concerns, and there's only one thing I can do. I have to laugh. Living
P.Z. Myers
#71. The superstition in which we were brought up never loses its power over us, even after we understand it.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
#72. Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
#73. At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
Gore Vidal
#74. The birth of science was the death of superstition.
Thomas Huxley
#75. For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.
Sean S. Kamali
#76. The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant.
Kakuzo Okakura
#77. Like ugly Asian babies, valid superstitions don't exist. At best, any perceived effect of a superstition is you merely psyching yourself out. Think of it as an asshole placebo.
Orlando Winters
#78. There are only two sources of human vice - idleness and superstition, and only two virtues - activity and intelligence.
Leo Tolstoy
#79. Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.
Voltaire
#80. Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition
Baruch Spinoza
#81. The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
Francis Bacon
#83. Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
Iain M. Banks
#84. Human beings ... are far too prone to generalize from one instance. The technical word for this, interestingly enough, is superstition.
Francis Crick
#85. 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.
Christopher Lasch
#86. Francis Wheen takes a hugely enjoyable sweep through the tangled thickets of superstition and gullibility in which modern man likes to ramble. He takes particular delight in reminding us how easily fools are parted from their money and how many of them there are.
Ferdinand Mount
#87. The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed.
Albert Einstein
#88. If you do not accuse each other, God will not accuse you. If you have no accuser you will enter heaven. What many people call sin is not sin; I do many things to break down superstition, and I will break it down.
Joseph Smith Jr.
#89. Evolution doesn't care whether you believe in it or not, no more than gravity does. I want to rekindle excitement over what we've achieved as a species with the space program. We can't afford to regress back to the days of superstition.
Seth MacFarlane
#90. The finest thing under the sun and moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.
Anne Rice
#91. There cannot be a censor, or a censorship that does not degenerate into absurdity and corruption, there never has been, and there never will be and of all the excuses for it that there could be, that it protects superstition, and religious fanaticism would be the worst.
Christopher Hitchens
#92. Superstition is that which we know in our minds to be rubbish. Faith is that which we hope in our hearts to be true.
R.A. Mathis
#93. I look at what we call faith, and all I see is superstition and subjugation. All religions [ ... ] They create false divisions, and enslave us to fantasies, when we need to focus on the here and now.
Helene Wecker
#94. Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which, Nature never pardons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#95. Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.
Carl Sagan
#96. I think the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends toward the elimination of religious superstition.
Paul Blanshard
#97. War clearly blurred the distinction between logic and superstition
Markus Zusak
#98. I tend to eat things in fours. I'll eat four nuts, four grapes, four chips at a time. I don't know why. It's not really a superstition. I don't think anything bad will happen if I don't, but three potato chips doesn't seem right.
Jimmy Wales
#99. There is superstition in avoiding superstition.
Francis Bacon
#100. Superstition is, always has been, and forever will be, the foe of progress, the enemy of education and the assassin of freedom.
Robert Green Ingersoll
