Top 36 Best Thomas Paine Quotes
#1. The countries the most famous and the most respected of antiquity are those which distinguished themselves by promoting and patronizing science, and on the contrary those which neglected or discouraged it are universally denominated rude and barbarous.
Thomas Paine
#2. Rights are not gifts from one man to another, nor from one class of men to another. It is impossible to discover any origin of rights otherwise than in the origin of man; it consequently follows that rights appertain to man in right of his existence, and must therefore be equal to every man.
Thomas Paine
#3. Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.
Thomas Paine
#4. The moral duty of man consists of imitatingthe moral goodness and beneficence of God,manifested in the creation, toward all His creatures.
Thomas Paine
#5. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.
Thomas Paine
#6. A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.
Thomas Paine
#8. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
Thomas Paine
#9. Tears may soothe the wounds they cannot heal.
Thomas Paine
#10. If all with doubts about the factual basis of their religion will but commit to their resolution through direct and unfettered inquiry, our country - and with it the world - will see a rebirth of Liberty,
Thomas Paine
#11. There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred.
Thomas Paine
#12. Quite naturally, the men who led in stirring up the revolt against Great Britain and in keeping the fighting temper of the Revolutionists at the proper heat were the boldest and most radical thinkers - men like Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson.
Charles A. Beard
#14. No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine
Christopher Hitchens
#15. Suspicion and persecution are weeds of the same dunghill, and flourish best together.
Thomas Paine
#16. Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
#17. An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.
Thomas Paine
#18. The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.
Thomas Paine
#19. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal intention; and it is incumbent upon as, and it contributes also to our own tranquillity, that we
Thomas Paine
#20. Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.
Thomas Paine
#22. There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure.
Thomas Paine
#23. The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points
his duty God, which every man must feel; and, with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by.
Thomas Paine
#24. It is the object only of war that makes it honorable.
Thomas Paine
#25. The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.
Thomas Paine
#26. The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason.
Thomas Paine
#27. The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
Thomas Paine
#28. It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by degrees, the consequences will be the same.
Thomas Paine
#29. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.
Thomas Paine
#30. Calumny is a vice of curious constitution; trying to kill it keeps it alive; leave it to itself and it will die a natural death.
Thomas Paine
#31. He, who survives his reputation, lives out of despite himself, like a man listening to his own reproach.
Thomas Paine
#33. The times that tried men's souls are over-and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.
Thomas Paine
#34. The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.
Thomas Paine
#35. I have spoken of Jonah, and of the story of him and the whale. - A fit story for ridicule, if it was written to be believed; or of laughter, if it was intended to try what credulity could swallow; for, if it could swallow Jonah and the whale it could swallow anything.
Thomas Paine
#36. Natural rights are those which always appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the rights of others.
Thomas Paine
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