#puritanism

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February. ↗

— Joseph Wood Krutch

#brought #charge #england #february #most

In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact. ↗

— Marlene Dietrich

#morality #obsession #prudishness #puritanism #sexuality

About these developments George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, was quite wrong. He described a new kind of state and police tyranny, under which the freedom of speech has become a deadly danger, science and its applications have regressed, horses are again plowing untilled fields, food and even sex have become scarce and forbidden commodities: a new kind of totalitarian puritanism, in short. But the very opposite has been happening. The fields are plowed not by horses but by monstrous machines, and made artificially fertile through sometimes poisonous chemicals; supermarkets are awash with luxuries, oranges, chocolates; travel is hardly restricted while mass tourism desecrates and destroys more and more of the world; free speech is not at all endangered but means less and less. ↗

— John A. Lukacs

#george-orwell #orwell #prophecy #puritanism #food