Top 500 Thomas Paine Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent.”

— Thomas Paine

202. “Let it then be heard, and let man learn to feel that the true greatness of a nation is founded on principles of humanity, and not on conquest.”

— Thomas Paine

203. “A world of little cares is continually arising, which busy or affluent life knows nothing of, to open the first door to distress. Hunger is not among the postponable wants; and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition is often the crisis of a life of ruin.”

— Thomas Paine

204. “It is important that we should never lose sight of this distinction. We must not confuse the peoples with their governments...”

— Thomas Paine

205. “The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation.”

— Thomas Paine

206. “Upon the whole, Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy, are appendages that belong to fabulous and not to true religion. They are the means by which so many Lo heres! and Lo theres! have been spread about the world, and religion been made into a trade. The success of one impostor gave encouragement to another, and the quieting salvo of doing some good by keeping up a pious fraud protected them from remorse.”

— Thomas Paine

207. “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

208. “It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all.”

— Thomas Paine

209. “I would give worlds, if I had them, if The Age of Reason had never been published. O Lord, help! Stay with me! It is hell to be left alone.”

— Thomas Paine

210. “The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.”

— Thomas Paine

211. “Wisdom is not the purchase of a day.”

— Thomas Paine

212. “Small islands, not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”

— Thomas Paine

213. “The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy.”

— Thomas Paine

214. “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

215. “No country can be called free which is governed by an absolute power; and it matters not whether it be an absolute royal power or an absolute legislative power, as the consequences will be the same to the people.”

— Thomas Paine

216. “There is a natural firmness in some minds, which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude.”

— Thomas Paine

217. “The United States should be an asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty.”

— Thomas Paine

218. “From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms! Through the land let the sound of it flee; Let the far and the near all unite, with a cheer, In defense of our Liberty Tree.”

— Thomas Paine

219. “The period of debate is closed. Arms, as a last resource, must decide the contest.”

— Thomas Paine

220. “Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to “bind me in all cases whatsoever” to his absolute will, am I to suffer it?”

— Thomas Paine

221. “Nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice.”

— Thomas Paine

222. “In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

— Thomas Paine

223. “Mutual fear is a principal link in the chain of mutual love.”

— Thomas Paine

224. “Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.”

— Thomas Paine

225. “Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.”

— Thomas Paine

226. “The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up.”

— Thomas Paine

227. “Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.”

— Thomas Paine

228. “Every quiet method for peace hath been ineffectual. Our prayers have been rejected with disdain; and only tended to convince us, that nothing flatters vanity, or confirms obstinacy in Kings more than repeated petitioning – and noting hath contributed more than that very measure to make the Kings of Europe absolute.”

— Thomas Paine

229. “We hold the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy, and poverty is far superior to that of supplying the invented wants of courtly extravagance.”

— Thomas Paine

230. “I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.”

— Thomas Paine

231. “That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.”

— Thomas Paine

232. “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature, which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered; and the easier repaired when disordered...”

— Thomas Paine

233. “Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous conscientiousness of honor. It is not the produce of riches only, but of the hard earnings of labor and poverty. It is drawn even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not a beggar passes, or perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that mass.”

— Thomas Paine

234. “It is always to be taken for granted, that those who oppose an equality of rights never mean the exclusion should take place on themselves.”

— Thomas Paine

235. “The intimacy which is contracted in infancy, and friendship which is formed in misfortune, are, of all others, the most lasting and unalterable.”

— Thomas Paine

236. “Prejudice, like the spider, makes everywhere its home. It has neither taste nor choice of place, and all that it requires is room. If the one prepares her food by poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other does the same. Prejudice may be denominated the spider of the mind.”

— Thomas Paine

237. “Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

— Thomas Paine

238. “Of all the tyrannies that effect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity.”

— Thomas Paine

239. “If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy... to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous... let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb.”

— Thomas Paine

240. “When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.”

— Thomas Paine

241. “In a chariot of light from the region of the day, the Goddess of Liberty came. She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love, the plant she named Liberty Tree.”

— Thomas Paine

242. “The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.”

— Thomas Paine

243. “Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security.”

— Thomas Paine

244. “Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.”

— Thomas Paine

245. “A constitution defines and limits the powers of the government it creates. It therefore follows, as a natural and also a logical result, that the governmental exercise of any power not authorized by the constitution is an assumed power, and therefore illegal.”

— Thomas Paine

246. “As priestcraft was always the enemy of knowledge, because priestcraft supports itself by keeping people in delusion and ignorance, it was consistent with its policy to make the acquisition of knowledge a real sin.”

— Thomas Paine

247. “The story of the whale swallowing Jonah, though a whale is large enough to do it, borders greatly on the marvelous; but it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale.”

— Thomas Paine

248. “THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD: And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man.”

— Thomas Paine

249. “When my country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.”

— Thomas Paine

250. “The obscene and vulgar stories in the Bible are as repugnant to our ideas of the purity of a Divine Being, as the horrid cruelties and murders it ascribes to Him are repugnant to our ideas of His justice.”

— Thomas Paine