I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity, as you do,
and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy,
Brutality, Daemons, Bonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from
the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any
man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs or the
last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can no severer satyr on the age. For
such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf,
never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind,
to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine. -
John Adams comment on the title of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason
[tell us how you really feel, John]
Friday, August 20, 2010
fine whine from Adams, not Sam
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