Quotes by Thomas Paine. These quotes are from Paine's own letters and writings between the years 1793 and 1806. Many of these Quotes by Thomas Paine come from his work The Age of Reason which he wrote to counter the promotion of athetism in the French Revolution. Paine was a deist and therefore believed in a Creator, but did not believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible. This caused him to receive strong criticism from the same Founding Fathers who had praised his earlier works Common Sense and The American Crisis, which helped fuel the American Revolution. These Quotes by Thomas Paine are listed chronologically with links to more before this period at the bottom.
"I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe
in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice,
loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy." - The Age of Reason,
Part 1, 1793
"If Jesus Christ was the being which those Mythologists tell us he was, and that he
came into this world to suffer, which is a word they sometimes use instead of to die,
the only real suffering he could have endured, would have been to live. His existence
here was a state of exilement or transportation from Heaven, and the way back to his
original country was to die. In fine, everything in this strange system is the reverse
of what it pretends to be." - The Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"The doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to
that of a debt which another person might pay; and as this pecuniary idea corresponds
again with the system of second redemption, obtained through the means of money given
to the Church for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated both
the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth there is no such thing
as redemption - that it is fabulous, and that man stands in the same relative
condition with his Maker as he ever did stand since man existed, and that it is
his greatest consolation to think so." - The Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"...for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty
change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou
knowest not so well as I." - The Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"The word of god is the creation we behold and it is in this word, which no human
invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man." - The
Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church,
by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any
church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." - The Age of Reason, Part
1, 1793
"It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God." - The Age of
Reason, Part 1, 1793
"What more does man want to know than that the hand or power that made these
things is divine, is omnipotent? Let him believe this with the force it is
impossible to repel, if he permits his reason to act, and his rule of moral
life will follow of course." - The Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism -
a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than
in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is
as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his
Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque
self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or
an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade."
- The Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science,
of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and
of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology." - The
Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity
of going on." - The Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"The Book of Job and the 19th Psalm, which even the Church admits to be more
ancient than the chronological order in which they stand in the book called the
Bible, are theological orations conformable to the original system of theology.
The internal evidence of those orations proves to a demonstration that the study
and contemplation of the works of creation, and of the power and wisdom of God,
revealed and manifested in those works, made a great part in the religious devotion
of the times in which they were written; and it was this devotional study and
contemplation that led to the discovery of the principles upon which what are
now called sciences are established; and it is to the discovery of these principles
that almost all the arts that contribute to the convenience of human life owe
their existence. Every principal art has some science for its parent, though the
person who mechanically performs the work does not always, and but very seldom,
perceive the connection." - The Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is
only the application of them that is human. Every science has for its basis a system
of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated
and governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them." - The Age
of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of
the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if He had said to
the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, "I have made an earth for man to
dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him science
and the arts. He can now provide for his own comfort, and learn from my munificence
to all to be kind to each other." - The Age of Reason, Part 1, 1793
"People in general do not know what wickedness there is in this pretended word of
God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible
is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they
carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they
have been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good heavens! it is quite
another thing; it is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be
greater blasphemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the
Almighty?" - The Age of Reason, Part 2, 1795
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more
derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason,
and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too
absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice,
it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics." - The
Age of Reason, Part 3, 1795
"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other
rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery,
for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has
not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case." - First
Principles of Government, July, 1795
"It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his
opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle
so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason
must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle;
and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right
to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral
principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy." - First
Principles of Government, July, 1795
"It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by
party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the
power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt
thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look
entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs
principle." - First Principles of Government, July, 1795
"An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to
stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that
would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression;
for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to
himself." - First Principles of Government, July, 1795
"The Reign of Terror that raged in America during the latter end of the
Washington Administration, and the whole of that of Adams, is enveloped
in mystery to me. That there were men in the Government hostile to the
representative system, was once their toast, though it is now their
overthrow, and therefore the fact is established against them." - Third
Letter to the Citizens of the United States, 1802
"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." - An
Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry, 1803-05
"As to the book called the Bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of
God. It is a book of lies and contradictions, and a history of bad times
and bad men. There are but a few good characters in the whole book." -
Letter to William Duane, April 23, 1806
If you liked these Quotes by Thomas Paine, you might like to read the complete text of Thomas Paine's Common Sense here.
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