Top 500 Thomas Paine Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “A single legislature, on account of the superabundance of its power, and the uncontrolled rabidity of its execution, becomes as dangerous to the principles of liberty as that of a despotic monarch.”

— Thomas Paine

403. “The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.”

— Thomas Paine

404. “I die content, I die for the liberty of my country.”

— Thomas Paine

405. “Mingling religion with politics may be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.”

— Thomas Paine

406. “Prophesying is lying professionally.”

— Thomas Paine

407. “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

408. “Government is not a trade which any man or body of men has a right to set up and exercise for his own emolument, but is altogether a trust, in right of those by whom that trust is delegated, and by whom it is always resumable. It has of itself no rights; they are altogether duties.”

— Thomas Paine

409. “A man will pass better through the world with a thousand open errors upon his back than in being detected in one sly falsehood. When one is detected, a thousand are suspected.”

— Thomas Paine

410. “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

411. “It is the object only of war that makes it honorable.”

— Thomas Paine

412. “A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.”

— Thomas Paine

413. “The burden of the national debt consists not in its being so many millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continue the same, the burden of the national debt is the same to all intents and purposes, be the capital more or less.”

— Thomas Paine

414. “It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself.”

— Thomas Paine

415. “If thou trusteth to the book called the Scriptures, thou trusteth to the rotten staff of fables and falsehood.”

— Thomas Paine

416. “Religion, considered as a duty, is incumbent upon every living soul alike, and, therefore, must be on a level to the understanding and comprehension of all. Man does not learn religion as he learns the secrets and mysteries of a trade. He learns the theory of religion by reflection. It arises out of the action of his own mind upon the things which he sees, or upon what he may happen to hear or to read, and the practice joins itself thereto.”

— Thomas Paine

417. “The difference between a republican and a courtier with respect to monarchy, is that the one opposes monarchy, believing it to be something; and the other laughs at it, knowing it to be nothing.”

— Thomas Paine

418. “Men do not change from enemies to friends by the alteration of a name.”

— Thomas Paine

419. “Titles are like a magicians wand which circumscribe human facility and prevent us from living the lives of man.”

— Thomas Paine

420. “How strangely is antiquity treated! To answer some purposes it is spoken of as the times of darkness and ignorance, and to answer others, it is put for the light of the world.”

— Thomas Paine

421. “They took care to represent government as a thing made up of mysteries, which only themselves understood, and they hid from the understanding of the nation, the only thing that was beneficial to know, namely, that government is nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of society.”

— Thomas Paine

422. “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

423. “Is it because you are sunk in the cruelty of superstition, or feel no interest in the honor of your Creator, that you listen to the horrid tales of the Bible, or hear them with callous indifference?”

— Thomas Paine

424. “It was needless, after this, to say that all was vanity and vexation of spirit; for it is impossible to derive happiness from the company of those whom we deprive of happiness.”

— Thomas Paine

425. “Aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice.”

— Thomas Paine

426. “As war is the system of government on the old construction, the animosity which nations reciprocally entertain, is nothing more than what the policy of their governments excites to keep up the spirit of the system. Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government.”

— Thomas Paine

427. “The case, however, is, that the Bible will not bear examination in any part of it, which it would do if it was the Word of God. Those who most believe it are those who know least about it, and priests always take care to keep the inconsistent and contradictory parts out of sight.”

— Thomas Paine

428. “All men can understand what representation is; and that it must necessarily include a variety of knowledge and talents.”

— Thomas Paine

429. “The prejudice of Englishmen, in favour of their own government by king, lords and commons, arises as much or more from national pride than reason.”

— Thomas Paine

430. “Suspicion and persecution are weeds of the same dunghill, and flourish best together.”

— Thomas Paine

431. “Government has no right to make itself a party in any debates respecting the principles or mode of forming or of changing, constitutions. It is not for the benefit of those who exercise the powers of government, that constitutions, and the governments issuing from them, are established.”

— Thomas Paine

432. “Prejudice will fall in a combat with interest.”

— Thomas Paine

433. “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself.”

— Thomas Paine

434. “It will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded.”

— Thomas Paine

435. “To possess ourselves of a clear idea of what government is, or ought to be, we must trace it to its origin.”

— Thomas Paine

436. “It is not because a part of the government is elective, that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected, possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.”

— Thomas Paine

437. “He, who survives his reputation, lives out of despite himself, like a man listening to his own reproach.”

— Thomas Paine

438. “The Christian religion begins with a dream and ends with a murder.”

— Thomas Paine

439. “The rights of men in society, are neither devisable or transferable, nor annihilable, but are descendable only, and it is not in the power of any generation to intercept finally, and cut off the descent. 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

440. “How necessary it is at all times to watch against the attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.”

— Thomas Paine

441. “We feel something like respect for consistency even in error. We lament the virtue that is debauched into a vice; but the vice that affects a virtue becomes the more detestable.”

— Thomas Paine

442. “There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice.”

— Thomas Paine

443. “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

444. “To reason with goverments, as they have existed for ages, is to argue with brutes. It is only from the nations themselves that reforms can be expected.”

— Thomas Paine

445. “When it is revealed to me, I will believe it to be revelation; but it is not and cannot be incumbent upon me to believe it to be revelation before; neither is it proper that I should take the word of man as the word of God, and put man in the place of God.”

— Thomas Paine

446. “It is a general idea, that when taxes are once laid on, they are never taken off.”

— Thomas Paine

447. “We now see all over Europe, and particularly in England, the curious phenomenon of a nation looking one way, and the government the other – the one forward and the other backward. If governments are to go on by precedent, while nations go on by improvement, they must at last come to a final separation; and the sooner and the more civilly they determine this point, the better.”

— Thomas Paine

448. “Governments arise either out of the people or over the people.”

— Thomas Paine

449. “That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true...”

— Thomas Paine

450. “Commerce is no other than the traffic of two individuals, multiplied on a scale of number; and, by the same rule that Nature intended the intercourse of two, she intended that of all!”

— Thomas Paine