Salem Witch Trials Quotes

“He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

“When change cometh, she will bring peace at her back. She will not bend to your will; you must bend to hers.”
― Adriana Mather, How to Hang a Witch

“He wondered at the atrocities human kind was capable of committing. The majority of those housed below were ill, mentally or physically, not witches. Most were poor victims--the outcasts of society; or the opposite, people so blessed, others coveted their lives.”
― Brynn Chapman, Where Bluebirds Fly

“If I do not do this thing, then it may go on and on. Nothing of the greater good comes without struggle and sacrifice in equal measure, be you man or woman, and in this way are we freed from tyranny.”
― Kathleen Kent, The Heretic's Daughter

“We see witchcraft, finally, as a deeply ambivalent but violent struggle /within/ women as well as an equally ambivalent but violent struggle /against/ women.”
― Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England

“He peered into the night-dark windows of the afflicted girls, whispering names and stirring fits into their dreams until their own screams awakened them. The girls concocted fantastic stories of witches and curses and torture at the hands of specters. More accusers joined their ranks without his nurturing, puppets of their own envy. Such imagination, such dedication to the destruction of their own. And all in his name. It touched his dark soul.”
― Susan Catalano, The Timeless Ones

“The Lord works in mysterious ways. What's true to one man, a wonder and a marvel, might not seem so to another, as God didn't intend it for him.”
― Katherine Howe, Conversion

“When change cometh, she will bring peace at her back. She will not bend to your will; you must bend to heres.”
― Adriana Mather, How to Hang a Witch

“..Abigail's singing while I painted. How we laughed so when no one was watching. And how finding a black-eyed Susan tucked into my business contracts reminded me of why I was doing that business in the first place. To really care for another is a reason to live.”
― Adriana Mather, How to Hang a Witch

“Deprived of my shackles, I was unable to find my balance and I tottered like a woman drunk on cheap liquor. I had to learn how to speak again, how to communicate with my fellow creatures, and no longer be content with a word here and there. I had to learn how to look them in the eyes again. I had to learn how to do my hair again now that it had become a tangle of untidy snakes hissing around my head. I had to rub ointments on my dry, cracked, skin, which had become like a badly tanned hide. Few people have the misfortune to be born twice.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“The world he thought he knew had become an odd thing, twisting time and purpose. But it had remained an unfair universe in the end.”
― Susan Catalano, The Timeless Ones

“The above is stereotypical FMS rhetoric. It employs a formulaic medley of factual distortions, exaggerations, emotionally charged language and ideological codewords, pseudo-scientific assertions, indignant protestations of bigotry and persecution, mockering of religious belief, and the usual tiresome “witch hunt” metaphors to convince the reader that there can be no debating the merits of the case. No matter what the circumstances of the case, the syntax is always the same, and the plot line as predictable as a 1920's silent movie. Everyone accused of abuse is somehow the victim of overzealous religious fanatics, who make unwarranted, irrational, and self-serving charges, which are incredibly accepted uncritically by virtually all social service and criminal justice professionals assign to the case, who are responsible for "brainwashing" the alleged perpetrator or witnesses to the crime. This mysterious process of "mass hysteria" is then amplified in the media, which feeds back upon itself, which finally causes a total travesty of justice which the FMS people in the white hats are duty-bound to redress. By reading FMS literature one could easily draw the conclusion that the entire American justice system is no better than that of the rural south in the days of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. The Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century are always the touchstone for comparison.”
― Pamela Perskin Noblitt, Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-First Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social, and Political Considerations

“Rather that being an aberrant expression of North American fears and attitudes about witchcraft, it should be instead be seen as the ultimate expression of it. And therein lies the most alarming aspect of the Salem witch crisis- if Salem is not aberrant then it cannot be comfortably consigned to the past.”
― Katherine Howe, The Penguin Book of Witches

“People gave the heavens a voice, so they had something to ask for: a better harvest, a healthy child or a milder winter. God was hope, and mankind needed hope the way it needed warmth, food and ale.
But with hope came disappointment.
The downtrodden yearned for stories to explain their misfortunes, though what they really wanted was somebody to blame for their misery. It was impossible to set fire to the blight that had ruined your crops, but a blight was easily summoned by a witch, at which point any poor woman would do.”
― Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water

“It all makes you wonder what you would've done had you been kicking around back then. If a teen girl, would you have followed the herd? If the mother of eight dead babies like Ann Putnam Sr., would you have given yourself a few hard bruises and then gleefully joined in the accusing because what else could explain your misfortunes? If you were a judge and "It" Puritan Cotton Mather, would you have ridden all the way out from Cambridge to see for yourself just what in the heck was going on in Salem Village? Would you have allowed into evidence proof from both this world and the invisible one into which only the purest heart can see?”
― Quan Barry, We Ride Upon Sticks

“God lives in the individual but the Devil moves in crowds”
― Darryl Cooper