Quote

As priestcraft was always the enemy of knowledge, because priestcraft supports itself by keeping people in delusion and ignorance, it was consistent with its policy to make the acquisition of knowledge a real sin.

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
People
Ignorance
Policy
Priestcraft
Enemy
Supports
Support
Acquisition
Knowledge
Delusion
Real
Consistent
Make
Keeping
Always
Sin

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We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and New Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries.
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The more acquisitions the government makes abroad, the more taxes the people have to pay at home.
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But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes?
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He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
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The case, however, is, that the Bible will not bear examination in any part of it, which it would do if it was the Word of God. Those who most believe it are those who know least about it, and priests always take care to keep the inconsistent and contradictory parts out of sight.
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These are the times that try men's souls.
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My country is wherever liberty lives.
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I know not whether taxes are raised to fight wars, or wars are fought in order to raise taxes.
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What is it the Bible teaches us? - raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
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It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.
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The people of America are a people of property almost every man is a freeholder.
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Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it.
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Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority perfect equality affords no temptation.
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The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing.
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It is a general idea, that when taxes are once laid on, they are never taken off.
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A nation under a well regulated government, should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.
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The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature and in the few instances (for there are some in all countries) in whom nature, as by a miracle, has survived in aristocracy, those men despise it.
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Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
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Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions.
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