"Time makes more converts than reason."

So said Thomas Paine, philosopher, drinker and all-around bad-ass.

Consider:

Called the then-King "the royal brute of Great Britain."

John Adams called his pamphlet Common Sense "a crapulous mess."

Called Napoleon, who venerated Paine and had told him he slept with a copy of one his works under his pillow (!), "the completest charlatan that ever existed". ("completest!" I'm bringing that back...)

His obituary in the New York Citizen read: "He had lived long, done some good, and much harm."

Plus, via Wikipedia:

A few years later, the agrarian radical William Cobbett dug up
his bones and shipped them back to England. The plan was to give Paine a heroic
reburial on his native soil, but the bones were still among Cobbett's effects
when he died over twenty years later. There is no confirmed story about what
happened to them after that, although down the years various people have claimed
to own parts of Paine's remains, such as his skull and right hand.

So, some rock you trip over in the woods next weekend could very well be one end of Thomas Paine's fibula! Who knows?

And he likely inspired T Pain to take the name. Probably. I mean, trying singing this:

How different is [Christianity] to the pure and simple profession of Deism! The
true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the
power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to
imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical.

to the tune of "I'm In Love With a Stripper!"