Thomas Paine Quotes
The declaration which says that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children is contrary to every principle of moral justice.
Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason: Part the Second. H. D. Symonds, 1795, p. 14.
Under the power of excommunication, the children of the offender were also shunned and penalized, losing not only religious privileges but many civil rights as well. In 1690 “civil pains and penalties consequent upon excommunication” were abolished in Scotland.
As a slave holder himself, this was a dramatic statement. Slavery was immoral, God’s justice will not be on the white slave owners side, a slave revolt or other event could occur and change things radically. One great puzzlement of American history has been why Jefferson, who wrote so eloquently against slavery and predicted the disaster that would come. would himself keep his slaves and never free them as George Washington did. Some argue that he was so broke financially, that he could not afford to free them.
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".
