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Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
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Thomas Paine
Age: 72 †
Born: 1737
Born: January 29
Died: 1809
Died: June 8
Author
Entrepreneur
Journalist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
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Thetford
Norfolk
Government
Necessary
Anarchist
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Liberty
Conservatism
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Anarchism
More quotes by Thomas Paine
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.
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It is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene.
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I detest the Bible as I detest everything that is cruel.
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The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy.
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Compassion, the fairest associate of the heart.
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It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God.
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It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.
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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.
Thomas Paine
Persecution is not an original feature in any religion but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.
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The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
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A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
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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.
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Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it.
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The representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom where it can be found.
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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.
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The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.
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Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it.
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The right of voting for representatives , is the primary right by which other rights are protected.
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To take away (voting) is to reduce a man to slavery.
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I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine
