The Rights of Man, pt. 2, page 414
"Paine's life and the birth of the American press prove that information media, taken together, were never meant,collectively, to be just another industry. Information wants to be free. That was the familiar and inspiring moralimperative behind the medium imagined by Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Media existed to spread ideas, to allowfearless argument, to challenge and question authority, to set a common social agenda.
Asked about the reasons for new media, Paine would have answered in a flash: to advance human rights, spreaddemocracy, ease suffering, pester government."
"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoringto make our fellow creatures happy.
But lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work,declare the things I do not believe and my reasons for not believing them.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by theTurkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches--whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish--appear to me no other than humaninventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.
I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise. They have the same right to their belief as Ihave to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does notconsist in believing or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."
"While Paine is best remembered for inspiring American revolutionaries, he was a working class hero in his native England, where he once worked as an "exciseman," or traveling tax-collector and smuggler-catcher. When his co-workers complained they were underpaid, he organized them, took their case to Parliament, and was fired for his troubles."
"The most important man in American history is arguably Thomas Paine, as John Adams stated: 'Without the pen of Paine the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.'That Paine is, more than any other person, responsible for liberty in the USA and throughout the world is a strong statement, subject to discussion. It is not, however, prima facie ridiculous.
... it is this man, Tom Paine, who is more singularly responsible for liberty as it exists everywhere in the world today than any other man. And it is Thomas Paine's type of thinking that is under strong attack in America, possibly as strong an attack as it has ever been under. The very men and ideas that gave America, and the world, liberty are still under attack from the very things that those men decried, the desire to close up minds inside an ancient book."