Thomas Paine Quotes
It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.
Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason, Part II. H.D. Symonds, 1795, p. 4.
Second to Benjamin Franklin, Rush was the only other real scientist of the American colonial era.
Thomas Paine was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights. Historian Saul K. Padover described him as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination".
