A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
Thomas PaineRead
Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Thomas Paine critiques the New Testament, questioning its validity as revealed religion due to apparent contradictions.
In this quote, Thomas Paine expresses his skepticism about the New Testament by highlighting its contradictions and absurdities. He suggests that labeling it as a revealed religion is almost sacrilegious, as it raises questions about its divine inspiration and reliability as a moral guide.
Themes
New TestamentBlasphemyReligionContradictionsFaith
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate on religious texts, this quote can illustrate the need for critical examination.
More from Thomas Paine
All quotes βThat God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
Thomas PaineRead
I consider the war of America against Britain as the country's war, the public's war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property.
Thomas PaineRead
Had the news of salvation by Jesus Christ been inscribed on the face of the sun and the moon, in characters that all nations would have understood, the whole earth had known it in twenty-four hours, and all nations would have believed it; whereas, though it is now almost two thousand years since, as they tell us, Christ came upon earth, not a twentieth part of the people of the earth know anything of it, and among those who do, the wiser part do not believe it.
Thomas PaineRead
The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
Thomas PaineRead
To reason with goverments, as they have existed for ages, is to argue with brutes. It is only from the nations themselves that reforms can be expected
Thomas PaineRead
Similar quotes
Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.
Colm ToibinRead
He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil.
William GodwinRead
There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100% Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else
Theodore RooseveltRead
Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeRead
And when a whirl-winde hath blowne the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flower, and this the yeomanly, this the Plebian bran.
John DonneRead
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.
Hannah ArendtRead