Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.
THOMAS PAINEOne good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.
More Thomas Paine Quotes
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It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies.
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Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
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It is always to be taken for granted, that those who oppose an equality of rights never mean the exclusion should take place on themselves.
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You cannot undermine police authority and then complain about rising crime.
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The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
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All churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, are simply human inventions. They use fear to enslave us. They are a monopoly for power and profit.
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A constitution defines and limits the powers of the government it creates. It therefore follows, as a natural and also a logical result, that the governmental exercise of any power not authorized by the constitution is an assumed power, and therefore illegal.
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Every person of learning is finally his own teacher.
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The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.
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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.
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Government without a constitution, is a power without a right.
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To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
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Every proprietor owes to the community a ground-rent for the land which he holds.
THOMAS PAINE -
Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight most often, are within.
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I consider the war of America against Britain as the country’s war, the public’s war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property.
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Taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.
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If those to whom power is delegated do well, they will be respected; if not, they will be despised.
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Christianity is the strangest religion ever set up, for it committed a murder upon Jesus in order to redeem mankind from the sin of eating an apple.
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Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.
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When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind of corruption generates and forms.
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He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
THOMAS PAINE -
One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.
THOMAS PAINE -
The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.
THOMAS PAINE -
The right of voting for representatives , is the primary right by which other rights are protected.
THOMAS PAINE -
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
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When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
THOMAS PAINE