Anastasios Gounaris

“The Puritans believed that the identity of the Saints had long since been determined by God. This meant that there was nothing a person could do to win salvation. But instead of being a reason to forsake all hope, what was known as predestination became a powerful goad to action. No one could be entirely sure as to who was one of the elect, and yet, if a person was saved, he or she naturally lived a godly life. As a result, the Puritans were constantly comparing their own actions to those of others, since their conduct might indicate whether or not they were saved. Underlying this compulsive quest for reassurance was a person’s conscience, which one divine described as “the voice of God in man.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

“Humanity began in a precarious world where tiny bands foraged and scrimped for food by day, huddled together for warmth by night. With the advent of agriculture came mass aggregation in towns and cities. The industrial revolution took work out of the home, making the populace “a mass of undifferentiated equals, working in a factory or scattered between the factories, the mines, and the offices, bereft forever of the feeling that work was a family affair, done within the household.” Economies prospered as families dissipated. In pursuit of further riches, the information age demands a more thoroughgoing surrender—less time for relationships, less time for children, more time for impersonal everything. Before our lives wither away into dust, we might ponder how much more prosperity human beings can possibly survive.”
― Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love

“If something was not in the scriptures, it was a man-made distortion of what God intended. At once radical and deeply conservative, the Puritans had chosen to spurn thousands of years of accumulated tradition in favor of a text that gave them a direct and personal connection to God.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

“However baby man may brag of his science and skill . . . ,” Melville writes in Moby-Dick, “yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War