Thomas Paine

It is the duty of every man, so far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error.

I have no wish to believe on that subject.

Let me have none of your Popish stuff! Get away with you, good morning.

I have lived an honest and useful life to mankind; my time has been spend in doing good and I die in perfect composure and resignation to the will of my Creator, God.

If a man makes the press utter atrocious things he becomes as answerable for them as if he had uttered them by word of mouth. Mr. Jefferson has said in his inaugural speech, that "error of opinion might be tolerated, when reason was left …

The christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun.

To God, and not to man, are all men to account for their belief.

We profess, and we proclaim in peace, the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe.

When at first thought we think of a creator our ideas appear to us undefined and confused; but if we reason philosophically, those ideas can be easily arranged and simplified. It is a Being, whose power is equal to his will.

The one is a half-rational of whom there is some hope, the other a visionary to whom we must be charitable.

The atheist who affects to reason, and the fanatic who rejects reason, plunge themselves alike into inextricable difficulties.

In things of this kind it sees something which it calls a natural cause, but none of the causes it sees is the cause of that motion which preserves the solar system.

when we speak of looking through nature up to nature's God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them. God is the power of first cause, nature is …

Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator Himself, they stop short and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence. They labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe everything they behold to innate …

all the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles; he can only discover them, and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.

The universe is composed of matter, and, as a system, is sustained by motion.

Search not written or printed books, but the Scripture called the Creation.

It must be in something that man could not make, that we must seek evidence for our belief, and that something is the universe; the true bible; the inimitable word, of God.

The universe is the bible of a true Theophilanthropist. It is there that he reads of God.

Religion has two principal enemies, fanaticism and infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality, the other by natural philosophy.

The Theophilanthropists believe in the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul.

The Theophilanthropists do not call themselves the disciples of such or such a man. They avail themselves of the wise precepts that have been transmitted by writers of all countries and in all ages.

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fall: it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon …

I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene.