Top 100 Quotes About Superstitions
#1. The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.
Jerry A. Coyne
#3. Excessive attention to the minutiae of astrology is one of the superstitions which has hurt the Hindus very much.
Swami Vivekananda
#4. When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it.
Mark Twain
#5. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
H.L. Mencken
#7. So much of the knowledge in our minds is based on lies and superstitions that come from thousands of years ago. Humans create stories long before we are born, and we inherit those stories, we adopt them, and we live in those stories.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
#8. Some ministers would make good martyrs: they are so dry they would burn well.
Charles Spurgeon
#9. I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.
Shirley Hazzard
#11. Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science.
Hal Clement
#12. I'm not superstitious. I don't really believe in star signs, sorry, or superstitions.
Richard Branson
#13. Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters - based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions - would they make categories. Everybody's everything.
Gore Vidal
#14. I have no superstitions. I don't have to have a Sunday outfit. I don't have socks or underwear I have to wear.
Zach Johnson
#15. Advaita is the only system that gives us complete control over ourselves, takes off all dependence and its associated superstitions, thus making us brave to suffer, brave to do, and in the long run, attain to absolute freedom.
Swami Vivekananda
#16. 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.
Andre Malraux
#17. Superstitions are man's way of trying to control things he has no control over ...
Sarah Addison Allen
#18. Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.
Voltaire
#19. All people have their blind side-their superstitions.
Charles Lamb
#20. Devils?" he said, his mind finding its train of thought as his hand found his cigarette lighter. "Devils are superstitions. Products of small minds and even smaller imaginations. There's one word that should be banned from the dictionary - devils. Ha! Now there's a flippant word.
Jason Mott
#21. Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.
William Kingdon Clifford
#22. Fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.
Marya Mannes
#23. Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.
Mark Twain
#24. That it is a solecism to begin a sentence with 'and' is a faintly lingering superstition. The OED gives examples ranging from the 10th to the 19th c.; the Bible is full of them.
Ernest Gowers
#25. Forget your religious superstitions built by cults and learn to love for the sake of humanity."-Stated after hearing a man use religion to justify and warrant hatred of people based on differences put forth by his spiritual beliefs. Oddly enough I happen to be very superstitious myself!
Rickey Russell
#27. No nation can truly develop unless fanaticism, primitive superstitions and metaphysical non-sense are eradicated.
Abhijit Naskar
#28. It is impossible to wait and weigh, in golden scales, the sentiments of prejudice and superstition that have gathered round the priests who are considered to be the custodians of Hinduism.
Mahatma Gandhi
#29. Superstition is believing that something means anything and that anything means something and that each thing means a particular thing and will mean a particular thing is coming. Oh yes it does.
Gertrude Stein
#30. A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
George Iles
#31. When superstitions enter the world of imagination, then intelligence and science become fiction.
Debasish Mridha
#32. Repentance, however difficult to be practiced, is, if it be explained without superstition, easily understood. Repentance is the relinquishment of any practice from the conviction that it has offended God.
Samuel Johnson
#33. Once we make our decision, all things will come to us. Auspicious signs are not a superstition, but a confirmation. They are a response.
Ming-Dao Deng
#34. The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
Thomas Jefferson
#35. Superstitions and belief in magic are perennial in just the same way as religion, and something near to being universal among mankind; and why this is so may be interesting, but in most cases the beliefs themselves are devoid of interesting content, at least to me.
Bryan Magee
#36. There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition.
Theodore Roosevelt
#38. It's up to the owner of a blanket to sleep on the blanket or to sleep in the blanket.
Kudakwashe Muzira
#39. I have endeavoured to dissipate these religious superstitions from the minds of women, and base their faith on science and reason, where I found for myself at last that peace and comfort I could never find in the Bible and the church.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#41. We're not as materialistic and income-tax conscious as we think. At the moment our superstitions are tucked away, but come out sometimes in strange ways sex crimes, black masses.
Terence Fisher
#42. There are some truths, however, that we should never forget: Superstition has always been the relentless enemy of science; faith has been a hater of demonstration; hypocrisy has been sincere only in its dread of truth, and all religions are inconsistent with mental freedom.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#43. There's no place on earth with more of the old superstitions and magic mixed into its daily life than the Scottish Highlands.
Diana Gabaldon
#44. May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times?
Charles Darwin
#45. Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.
Aldous Huxley
#46. Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.
Henry David Thoreau
#47. William Henry Flower the Anglican too praised evolution as a cleansing solvent, dissolving the dross which had 'encrusted' Christianity 'in the days of ignorance and superstition'.
Adrian Desmond
#48. History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#49. Fanaticism is the child of false zeal and of superstition, the father of intolerance and of persecution.
John William Fletcher
#50. You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors.
Chinua Achebe
#51. A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.
George Eliot
#52. One must not align himself with the beliefs that limit his thinking; free from all beliefs and superstitions; we all make difference.
M.F. Moonzajer
#53. I have, thanks to my travels, added to my stock all the superstitions of other countries. I know them all now, and in any critical moment of my life, they all rise up in armed legions for or against me.
Sarah Bernhardt
#54. I think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#55. A Culture based on superstitions will do worse than one based on scientific knowledge and rational thoughts
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
#57. Superstition is just fantasy with attitude; it's a way of erroneously trying to control events.
Joy Browne
#58. I used to have a lot of superstitions, and then I realized that it was kind of hogwash. Once I let go of them, I relaxed a lot.
Amy Adams
#59. Christ ... an anarchist who succeeded. That's all.
Andre Malraux
#60. The only practical effect of having a soul is that it fills man with anthropomorphic and anthropocentric vanities - in brief, with the cocky superstitions that make him disgusting.
H.L. Mencken
#61. Death approaches, which is always impending like the stone over Tantalus: then comes superstition with which he who is imbued can never have peace of mind.
[Lat., Accedit etiam mors, quae quasi saxum Tantalo semper impendit: tum superstitio, qua qui est imbutus quietus esse numquam potest.]
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#62. The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.
Steven Pinker
#64. There are no superstitions but those you invent
Jack Lasenby
#65. It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch.
Ludwig Von Mises
#66. [T]he superstitions to be feared in the present day are much less religious than political; and of all the forms of idolatry I know none more irrational and ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers. - William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty
Bryan Caplan
#67. Do not confuse McGuinty's belief system with a true faith. It is a superstition, the tenets of which are capable of being scientifically disproven.
Ezra Levant
#68. I believe in superstitions. You don't talk about a child who hasn't been born.
Elie Wiesel
#69. To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing,
Hypatia
#70. Come out, O lions, and shake off the ancient mysticism and prejudices.
Abhijit Naskar
#71. Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
Northrop Frye
#72. In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.
William Robertson Smith
#73. And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.
Thomas Hobbes
#75. Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#76. You will not think it unnatural that those who have an object depending, which strongly engages their hopes and fears, should be somewhat inclining to superstition.
Edmund Burke
#77. Woman's narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power. Man haslong overcome the superstitions that still engulf women.
Emma Goldman
#78. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. The superstition of the people was not embittered theological rancor.
Edward Gibbon
#79. True education is to learn how to think, not what to think. If you know how to think, if you really have that capacity, then you are a free human being-free of dogmas, superstitions, ceremonies-and therefore you can find out what religion is.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#80. Matrimony is always a vice, all that can be done is to excuse it and sanctify it; therefore it was made a religious sacrament.
St. Jerome
#81. This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition
Steven Weinberg
#82. People think I must have all these superstitions, but I don't. I use my batting gloves 'til they wear out. I broke four or five bats during the streak, and I didn't cry over any of them.
Jimmy Rollins
#83. My mind is just as open as it ever was, professor. But it's a scientific mind, and there's no place in it for superstitions.
Garrett Fort
#84. I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter - are all worthy of art.
August Wilson
#85. Superstition always inspires littleness, religion grandeur of mind; the superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#87. Let's stop believing that our differences make us superior or inferior to one another. Let's not be afraid that our different colors make us different people. Who cares? It's just a lie, and we don't have to believe all the lies and superstitions that control our lives.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
#88. All gamblers are paranoid, though they call it superstition.
Mario Puzo
#89. The Holy Bible. Promoting ignorance and superstition for nearly 2000 years.
Robert M. Price
#90. I have no lucky charm. I am 100 percent superstition-free, and I take nothing for granted.
Jeff Bridges
#91. There is a power under your control that is greater than poverty, greater than the lack of education, greater than all your fears and superstitions combined. It is the power to take possession of your own mind and direct it to whatever ends you may desire.
Andrew Carnegie
#92. Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.
Denis Diderot
#93. Superstition belongs to the essence of mankind and takes refuge, when one thinks one has suppressed it completely, in the strangest nooks and crannies; once it is safely ensconced there, it suddenly reappears.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#94. Go get yourself crucified and then rise on the third day.
Voltaire
#95. think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitions.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#96. He no playa the game, he no maka the rules.
Earl Butz
#97. The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#98. How much luckier than all the rest of mankind are the astrologers who, if they tell one truth among a hundred lies, obtain so much credit that even their lies are believed.
Francesco Guicciardini
#99. I will not keep quiet until a revolution is started to fight ignorance and superstitions in the church of the lord Jesus Christ and in the nation of my birth.
Sunday Adelaja
#100. One of the great advantages of the study of old Norse or Icelandic literature is the insight given by it into the origin of world-wide superstitions. Norse tradition is transparent as glacier ice, and its origin is as unmistakable.
Sabine Baring-Gould