“Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.”

Source: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

The Philosophy of Paine (1925)
Context: He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity.
His Bible was the open face of nature, the broad skies, the green hills. He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds — or on persons devoted to them — have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.
When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a "dirty little atheist" he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished.

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe — Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (2017)

Book VI, Ch. 1
Progress and Poverty (1879)
Context: In the plan of forcing by endurance an increase of wages, there are in such methods inherent disadvantages which workingmen should not blink. I speak without prejudice, for I am still an honorary member of the union which, while working at my trade, I always loyally supported. But, see: The methods by which a trade union can alone act are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical. A strike, which is the only recourse by which a trade union can enforce its demands, is a destructive contest — just such a contest as that to which an eccentric, called "The Money King," once, in the early days of San Francisco, challenged a man who had taunted him with meanness, that they should go down to the wharf and alternately toss twenty-dollar pieces into the bay until one gave in. The struggle of endurance involved in a strike is, really, what it has often been compared to — a war; and, like all war, it lessens wealth. And the organization for it must, like the organization for war, be tyrannical. As even the man who would fight for freedom, must, when he enters an army, give up his personal freedom and become a mere part in a great machine, so must it be with workmen who organize for a strike. These combinations are, therefore, necessarily destructive of the very things which workmen seek to gain through them — wealth and freedom.

Source: Space Cadet (1948), Chapter 9 “Long Haul”, p. 101

No. 15
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

"EL FUCKING NIÑO, in which i post no pictures of pirates" at AFP : Amanda Palmer's blog http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/451829875/el-fucking-nino-in-which-i-post-no-pictures-of

Interviewed in Winter 1992, quoted in Naim Attallah, Asking Questions (Quartet Books, 1996), pp. 354-5
1990s

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 145