“…when Theodore Roosevelt, to his lasting discredit, referred to Thomas Paine, without having read him, as ‘a filthy little atheist,’ he was slandering someone whose belief in the traditional doctrines of the existence of a Supreme Power and the immortality of the Soul was much more unqualified than the belief of two thinkers who have been characterized as the leading Protestant theologians of the twentieth century–Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr.” –Sydney Hook, from his introduction to Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine