Quotes from Thomas Paine

I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection

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.

Action and care will in time wear down the strongest frame, but guilt and melancholy are poisons of quick dispatch.

Political Liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not injure another. The exercise of the natural rights of every [human], has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every other [human] the free exercise of the same rights.

Most other passions have their periods of fatigue and rest, their suffering and their cure; but obstinacy has n (Quote by - resource, and the first wound is mortal.

These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph.

Reputation is what men and women think of us. Character is what God and the angels know of us.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.

Panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstone of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might have lain forever undiscovered.

Those who want to reap the benefits of this great nation must bear the fatigue of supporting it.

I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.

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.

What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.

It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.

These are the times that try men's souls.

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances… that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.

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

But such is the irresistable nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.

It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. And if there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.

We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.

He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.