Top 500 Thomas Paine Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature; and in the few instances (for there are some in all countries) in whom nature, as by a miracle, has survived in aristocracy, those men despise it.”

— Thomas Paine

352. “Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin.”

— Thomas Paine

353. “The Bill of Rights should contain the general principles of natural and civil liberty. It should be to a community what the eternal laws and obligations of morality are to the conscience. It should be unalterable by any human power...”

— Thomas Paine

354. “If any generation of men ever possessed the right of dictating the mode by which the world should be governed for ever, it was the first generation that existed; and if that generation did it not, no succeeding generation can show any authority for doing it, nor can set any up.”

— Thomas Paine

355. “As my object was not myself, I set out with the determination, and happily with the disposition, of not being moved by praise or censure, friendship or calumny, nor of being drawn from my purpose by any personal altercation; and the man who cannot do this, is not fit for a public character.”

— Thomas Paine

356. “And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathizing and benevolent in the heart of man.”

— Thomas Paine

357. “We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute.”

— Thomas Paine

358. “I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie; and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow.”

— Thomas Paine

359. “It is unpleasant to see character throw itself away.”

— Thomas Paine

360. “Man did not make the earth, and though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity, any part of it.”

— Thomas Paine

361. “It is attributed to Henry IV of France, a man of enlarged and benevolent heart, that he proposed, about the year 1610, a plan for abolishing war in Europe. The plan consisted in constituting an European Congress, or as the French authors style it, a Pacific republic; by appointing delegates from the several nations who were to act as a court of arbitration in any disputes that might arise between nation and nation.”

— Thomas Paine

362. “The animals to whom nature has given the faculty we call cunning know always when to use it, and use it wisely; but when man descends to cunning he blunders and betrays.”

— Thomas Paine

363. “To take away (voting) is to reduce a man to slavery.”

— Thomas Paine

364. “There are injuries which nature cannot forgive; she would cease to be nature if she did.”

— Thomas Paine

365. “The New Testament rests itself for credulity and testimony on what are called prophecies in the Old Testament, of the person called Jesus Christ; and if there are no such things as prophecies of any such person in the Old Testament, the New Testament.”

— Thomas Paine

366. “The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.”

— Thomas Paine

367. “It is a faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object.”

— Thomas Paine

368. “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

369. “The NT, compared with the Old, is like a farce of one act...”

— Thomas Paine

370. “I know not whether taxes are raised to fight wars, or wars are fought in order to raise taxes.”

— Thomas Paine

371. “All Of Us Might Wish At Times That We Lived In A More Tranquil World... (yet) Our Times Are Challenging And Filled With Opportunity.”

— Thomas Paine

372. “A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.”

— Thomas Paine

373. “The Allwise Creator hath been dishonored by being made the author of fable and the human mind degraded by believing it.”

— Thomas Paine

374. “The greatest characters the world has known, have rose on the democratic floor. Aristocracy has not been able to keep a proportionate pace with democracy.”

— Thomas Paine

375. “Wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age.”

— Thomas Paine

376. “Thus commerce, though in itself a moral nullity, has had a considerable influence in tempering the human mind... he trades with the same countries... (that he) would have gone to war with.”

— Thomas Paine

377. “Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.”

— Thomas Paine

378. ““Government,” says Swift, “is a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads.””

— Thomas Paine

379. “The final event to himself has been, that as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.”

— Thomas Paine

380. “The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.”

— Thomas Paine

381. “It is a position not to be controverted, that the earth... was and ever would have continued to be, the COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE.”

— Thomas Paine

382. “We do not admit the authority of the church with respect to its pretended infallibility, its manufactured miracles, its setting itself up to forgive sins. It was by propagating that belief and supporting it with fire that she kept up her temporal power.”

— Thomas Paine

383. “But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into kings and subjects. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and band, the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.”

— Thomas Paine

384. “What is it the Bible teaches us? – rapine, cruelty, and murder.”

— Thomas Paine

385. “It requires but a very small glance of thought to perceive, that although laws made in one generation often continue in force through succeeding generations, yet that they continue to derive their force from the consent of the living. A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non repealing passes for consent.”

— Thomas Paine

386. “I have never made it a consideration whether the subject was popular or unpopular, but whether it was right or wrong; for that which is right will become popular, and that which is wrong, though by mistake it may obtain the cry or fashion of the day, will soon lose the power of delusion, and sink into disesteem.”

— Thomas Paine

387. “An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

— Thomas Paine

388. “Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title.”

— Thomas Paine

389. “Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions.”

— Thomas Paine

390. “It is against the whole hell of Monarchy that I have declared war.”

— Thomas Paine

391. “Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured.”

— Thomas Paine

392. “There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.”

— Thomas Paine

393. “It may perhaps be said that it signifies nothing to a man what is done to him after he is dead; but it signifies much to the living; it either tortures their feelings or hardens their hearts...”

— Thomas Paine

394. “In the progress of politics, as in the common occurrences of life, we are not only apt to forget the ground we have travelled over, but frequently neglect to gather up experiences as we go.”

— Thomas Paine

395. “What more does man want to know than that the hand or power that made these things is divine, is omnipotent? Let him believe this with the force it is impossible to repel, if he permits his reason to act, and his rule of moral life will follow of course.”

— Thomas Paine

396. “What Athens was in miniature America will be in magnitude. The one was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration of the present.”

— Thomas Paine

397. “Mind thine own concerns. If he believes not as thou believest, it is a proof that thou believest not as he believes, and there is no earthly power can determine between you.”

— Thomas Paine

398. “It can only be by blinding the understanding of man, and making him believe that government is some wonderful mysterious thing, that excessive revenues are obtained. Monarchy is well calculated to ensure this end. It is the popery of government; a thing kept up to amuse the ignorant, and quiet them into taxes.”

— Thomas Paine

399. “I disbelieve all holy men and holy books.”

— Thomas Paine

400. “No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone.”

— Thomas Paine