MemeMachineGo!

"There is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. ARRRRRR!" Thomas Paine was a pirate.

In late adolescence, he enlisted and briefly served as a privateer.

In his autobiography, Ben Franklin was fairly candid about having been a whoremonger. See anyone in public life today say that.

That hard-to-be-governed passion of youth hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides a continual risque to my health by a distemper which of all things I dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it.

From its earliest days, Harvard's student body included Native Americans, with at least two Native Americans known to have attended prior to 1650. Only one graduated in the 17th century (in 1665.) The Indian College printing press printed the first bible in North America, translated into Wampanoag by a Puritan missionary, John Eliot (who invented his own transliteration, as the Wampanoags didn't have a writing system.)