In a time when both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.
The most intense wars are civil wars, just as the most vivid and rending personal conflicts are internal ones, and what I hope to do now is give some idea of what it is like to fight on two fronts at once, to try and keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind, even occasionally to show two faces at the same time.
It is a deformity in some ‘radicals’ to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or ‘real’ one. Many a purge or show trial has got merrily under way in this manner.
The antagonistic exponents of freedom and absolutism must thus meet at last and then will be fought the mighty battle on which the world will look with breathless interest; for on its issue the freedom or the slavery of the world will depend.
It was never that difficult to see that religion was a cause of hatred and conflict, and that its maintenance depended upon ignorance and superstition.
By these last-minute improvisations, he had, without calling any undue attention to the fact, become the first president to play the race card both ways – once traditionally and once, so to speak, in reverse. His opportunist defenders, having helped him with a reversible chameleonlike change in the color of his skin, still found themselves stuck with the content of his character.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich st.
Richard Dawkins may have phrased it most pungently when he argued that everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god – from Ra to Shiva – in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.
I am always and at once on the defensive, for example, when people speak of races and nations as if they were personalities and had souls and destinies and such like.
If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.
Old-fashioned people still say “bless you” when one sneezes, but they have forgotten the reason for the custom. The reason was that people were thought to sneeze out their souls, and before their souls could get back lurking demons were apt to enter the unsouled body; but if any one said “God bless you,” the demons were frightened off.
Faith of that sort – the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason – is now plainly impossible.
Yet again it is demonstrated that monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.
Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves; in any case they are, as I was once taught to say, tackling the man and not the ball.
Sartre distinguished between rebels and revolutionaries. The rebel, he says, secretly quite wants the world and the system to remain as it is. Its permanence, after all, is the guarantee of his continuing ability to “rebel.” The revolutionary, in contrast, really wishes to overthrow and replace existing conditions. The second enterprise is obviously no laughing matter.
As Bertie Wooster once phrased it, they experienced some difficulty in detecting the bluebird.
The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is, that the objects of which we have no experience, resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual, is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.
Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearful, partially formed animals with a terror of death and the dark.
An antique saying has it that a man’s life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty, and war.
Find a society that’s adopted the teachings of Spinoza, Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits – as a result of doing that – into famine and war and dictatorship and torture and repression. That’s the experiment I would like to run. I don’t think that’s going to end up with a gulag.
Who but a slave thanks his master for what his master has decided to do without bothering to consult him.