The Tumult Soon Subsides

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.  But the tumult soon subsides.  Time makes more converts than reason.

-- Thomas Paine (1737-1908), English-American political writer and activist, Common Sense, Introduction (10 January 1776)