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Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time.

Thomas Paine

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Thomas Paine
Age: 72 †
Born: 1737
Born: January 29
Died: 1809
Died: June 8
Author
Entrepreneur
Journalist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Prosaist
Writer
Thetford
Norfolk
Reason
Millions
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Seen
Probable
Good
Courses
Skepticism
Never
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Men
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Atheism
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Nature
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We hold the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy, and poverty is far superior to that of supplying the invented wants of courtly extravagance.
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Christianity is the strangest religion ever set up, for it committed a murder upon Jesus in order to redeem mankind from the sin of eating an apple.
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War ought to be no man's wish.
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The representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom where it can be found.
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Titles do not count with posterity.
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In the progress of politics, as in the common occurrences of life, we are not only apt to forget the ground we have travelled over, but frequently neglect to gather up experiences as we go.
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The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points--his duty God, which every man must feel and, with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by.
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Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured
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Now is the seedtime of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now, will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read in it full grown characters.
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Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins and you will have sins in abundance.
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The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing.
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The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.
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Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order.
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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.
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But such is the irresistable nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.
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Every person of learning is finally his own teacher.
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What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
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The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
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There is a happiness in Deism, when rightly understood, that is not to be found inany other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them.
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It is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene.
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