Quotes from Ethan Allen

While we are under the tyranny of Priests, it will ever be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith.

Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason.

There is nothing that will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington.

The idea of a God we infer from our experimental dependence on something superior to ourselves in wisdom, power and goodness, which we call God; our senses discover to us the works of God which we call nature, and which is a manifest demonstration of his invisible essence. Thus it is from the works of nature that we deduce the knowledge of a God, and not because we have, or can have any immediate knowledge of, or revelation from him.

Princes may make laws and repeal them, but they can neither make nor destroy virtue, and how indeed should they be able to do what is impossible to the Deity himself? Virtue being as immutable in its nature as the divine will which is the ground of it.

That there are degrees in the knowledge of rational beings, and also in their capacities to acquire it, cannot be disputed, as it is so very obvious among mankind.

The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills, and you shall understand it.

Virtue and vice are the only things in this world, which, with our souls, are capable of surviving death; the former is the rational and only procuring cause of all intellectual happiness, and the latter of conscious guilt and misery; and therefore, our indispensable duty and ultimate interest is, to love, cultivate and improve the one, as the means of our greatest good, and to hate and abstain from the other, as productive of our greatest evil.

To suppose that God Almighty has confined his goodness to this world, to the exclusion of all others, is much similar to the idle fancies of some individuals in this world, that they, and those of their communion or faith, are the favorites of heaven exclusively; but these are narrow and bigoted conceptions, which are degrading to a rational nature, and utterly unworthy of God, of whom we should form the most exalted ideas.

If the scriptures had been written with one half of the care and ability with which they have been explained and defended, they would not have been the cause of so much contention and mischief, and they would not have stood in need of so much explanation and defense.

I found myself in possession of happiness once more, and the evils I had lately suffered, gave me uncommon relish for it.

The discoveries of science have proved that the opinions concerning a firmament above, and a flat earth beneath, are completely inaccurate; but faith delights more in sublimity than truth; it soars far above science in its discoveries, and holds accuracy in contempt.

It may be objected that a man cannot subsist in the sun; but does it follow from thence, that God cannot or has not constituted a nature peculiar to that fiery region, and caused it to be as natural and necessary for it to suck in and breathe out flames of fire, as it is for us to do the like in air.

Perhaps we are the most selfish, oddest, and cunningest medley of beings of our size in the universe. However to complete the scale of being, it seems to have been requisite that the link of being called man must have been, and since under the Divine government, we have a positive existence, we cannot ultimately fail of being better than not to have been.

Morality does not derive its nature from books, but from the fitness of things.

Who would imagine that the Deity conducts his providence similar to the detestable despots of this world? Oh horrible? most horrible impeachment of Divine Goodness!

We must perceive by our senses, before we can reflect with the mind. Our sensorium is that essential medium between the divine and human mind, through which God reveals to man the knowledge of nature, and is our only door of correspondence with God or with man.

Most of the human race, by one means or other, are prepossessed with principles opposed to the religion of reason.

As [religious teachers] exclude reason and justice from their imaginary notions of religion, they also exclude it from the providence and moral government of God.

In the name of the Lord Jehovah and the Continental Congress.

In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty. The history of nations doomed to perpetual slavery, in consequence of yielding up to tyrants their natural born liberties, I read with a sort of philosophical horror; so that the first systematical and bloody attempt at Lexington, to enslave America, thoroughly electrified my mind, and fully determined me to take part with my country.

In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in such parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue ; which is of itself a strong presumption that in the infancy of letters, learning and science, or in the world's non-age, those who confided in miracles, as a proof of the divine mission of the first promulgators of revelation, were imposed upon by fictitious appearances instead of miracles.

Those who invalidate reason, ought seriously to consider, 'whether they argue against reason, with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle, that they are laboring to dethrone;' but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do,) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.