Improvement and the world will expire together; And till that period arrives, we may plunder the mine, but can never exhaust it! That ‘We have found out everything,’ has been the motto of every age. Let our ideas travel a little into antiquity, and we shall find larger portions of it than now; and so […]
Thomas Paine Quotes
Ignorance is of a peculiar nature. Once dispelled it is impossible to reestablish it.
It is with pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.
For my own part, I do not believe there is one word of historical truth in the whole book (The Bible). I look upon it at best to be a romance: the principal personage of which is an imaginary or allegorical character founded upon some tale.
Thomas did not believe the resurrection (John 20:25), and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.
The real object of all despotism is revenue.
The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world […]
The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar.
These two chapters (Genesis 1 and 2), instead of containing, as has been believed, one continuous account of the creation, written by Moses, contain two different and contradictory stories of a creation, made by two different persons, and written in two different styles of expression.
That there are two stories is as visible to the eye, when attended to, as that there are two chapters, and that they have been written by different persons, nobody knows by whom. If this then is the strange condition the beginning of the Bible is in, it leads to a just suspicion, that the […]
