Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was a notorious free-thinker and democrat, born in Thetford. He emigrated to America, contributed, as he boasted, by his pamphlet "Common Sense," to "free America," by rousing it to emancipate itself from the mother-country. He wrote the "Rights of Man" against Burke's "Reflections". He had to emigrate to France, took part in the Revolution to aid in its emancipation also, offended Robespierre, and was put in prison, where he wrote the first part of his "Age of Reason," a book which offended the Christian world and procured him ignominy and even execration in many quarters. He died in New York, but his bones were conveyed to England by Cobbett in 1819.

Wisdom & Quotes

• My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

- The Rights of Man

• Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

- Common Sense

• Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the kind of a child, cannot be a true system.

- The Age of Reason

• A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.

- quoted in Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America

• These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.

- The American Crisis

• 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.

- The American Crisis

Edward Gibbon