Showing posts with label Tom Paine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Paine. Show all posts

Thursday, 12 February 2009

Tom Paine

Still brilliant more than 200 years later, here's a wonderfully catty remark about Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man:

I know a place in America called Point-no-Point, because as you proceed along the shore, gay and flowery as Mr Burke's language, it continually recedes and presents itself at a distance before you; but when you have got as far as you can go, there is no point at all. Just thus it is with Mr Burke's three hundred and fifty-six pages.


On religion:
With respect to what are called denominations of religion, if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world is right, or all the world is wrong.