Quotes About Paine

Paine was understandably concerned at first that the outbreak of fighting would disrupt his new livelihood. He wrote to Franklin, "I thought it very hard to have the country set on fire about my ears almost the moment I got into it." But then he grabbed a torch.

What Ingersoll, like Voltaire and Paine before him, understood was the indivisibility of human rights, and he understood this not in spite of but precisely because of his disbelief in a deity who had supposedly "designed" the order of nature.

Thomas Paine is America's single great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists (Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, and Noam Chomsky), and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups (Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West, and bell hooks). But we do not have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.

Paine knew liberty was intimately connected with language. And he knew that those who seek to monopolize power always use inaccessible and specialized jargon to exclude the average citizen. Paine broke these chains.

He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to Defender of the Faith, than George the Third.

To begin with a summary of Paine's astonishing life and career is to commence with a sense of wonder that he was ever able to emerge at all.

Paine and Joel Barlow attempted to change Jefferson's mind, urging him to settle thrifty German immigrants in the new lands and to permit black families to travel from other states to acquire their own land there, but the sugar interest triumphed

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

He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to Defender of the Faith, than George the Third.

The connection between vice and meanness is a fit subject for satire, but when the satire is a fact, it cuts with the irresistible power of a diamond.

That it was noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected, is granted.