A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
The puritan through life's sweet garden goes to pluck the thorn and cast away the rose.
The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man -- that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense -- has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.