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The story of the whale swallowing Jonah, though a whale is large enough to do it, borders greatly on the marvelous but it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale.

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
Enough
Miracle
Swallowing
Would
Large
Swallowed
Though
Approached
Story
Whales
Religion
Nearer
Idea
Greatly
Stories
Marvelous
Jonah
Ideas
Borders
Whale

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A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.
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Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
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[A]ll churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, are simply human inventions. They use fear to enslave us. They are a monopoly for power and profit.
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Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying
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And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.
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Priests and conjurors are of the same trade.
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A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.
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They took care to represent government as a thing made up of mysteries, which only themselves understood, and they hid from the understanding of the nation, the only thing that was beneficial to know, namely, that government is nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of society.
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It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
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Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance.
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The final event to himself has been, that as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.
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The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.
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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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If anything had or could have a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust and calculated to support fraud and oppression.
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Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society.
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Religion is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.
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Lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind.
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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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We repose an unwise confidence in any government, or in any men, when we invest them officially with too much, or an unnecessary quantity of, discretionary power.
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I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature, which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered and the easier repaired when disordered.
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