Quotes from Thomas Paine

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...

He who dares not offend cannot be honest.

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

Wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age.

From the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom.

There are two distinct classes of men - those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes.

The slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.

Men should not petition for rights, but take them

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions and a history of bad times and bad men.

Character is much easier kept than recovered.

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.

Wisdom is not the purchase of a day, and it is no wonder that we should err at the first setting off.

The representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom where it can be found.

Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.

It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God.

We repose an unwise confidence in any government, or in any men, when we invest them officially with too much, or an unnecessary quantity of, discretionary power.

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.

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

The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity.

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.

A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men.

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

Characer is much easier kept than recovered.