Thomas Paine Quotes
One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism can do, and credulity believe.
Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason, Part the Second. H. D. Symonds, 1795.
He was an overt atheist; there were many non believers in Europe at the time but few were overt. He also wrote under the name of Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud.
The Radical Religious Right in America did not have its origins as a reaction to the 1960s as some believe. It was present among the Know Nothings in the 19th Century, the KKK in the aftermath of Reconstruction, and during the Second World War.
Commenting on the murder of a Chinese woman:
Thomas Paine was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights. Historian Saul K. Padover described him as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination".
