Thomas Paine: “Every man is a proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right.”

It serves to keep up deceitful expectations which prevent people from looking into the defects and abuses of government.

With how much more glory, and advantage to itself, does a nation act, when it exerts its powers to rescue the world from bondage, and to create itself friends, than when it employs those powers to increase ruin, desolation, and misery.

Reason and discussion will soon bring things right, however wrong they may begin.

But as religion is very improperly made a political machine, and the reality of it is thereby destroyed, I will conclude this work with stating in what light religion appears to me.