"I am wiling 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 Fury, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of The burning Brand from the bottomless Pitt: or any thing but the age of Reason. I know not whether any Man in the World has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no Severer satyr in the Age. For Such a mongrel between Pigg 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. He deserves it much more, than the Courtezan who was consecrated to represent the Goddess in the Temple at Paris, and whose name, Tom has given to the Age. The real intellectual faculty has nothing to do with the Age the Strumpet or Tom."
- John Adams in a letter to a friend on his opinion of his political opponent Thomas Paine
- John Adams in a letter to a friend on his opinion of his political opponent Thomas Paine