Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Character is much easier kept than recovered.
Thomas Paine
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Thomas Paine
Age: 72 †
Born: 1737
Born: January 29
Died: 1809
Died: June 8
Author
Entrepreneur
Journalist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Prosaist
Writer
Thetford
Norfolk
War
Persona
Character
Recovery
Much
Reputation
Life
Kept
Integrity
Standards
Personality
Easier
Recovered
More quotes by Thomas Paine
It is important that we should never lose sight of this distinction. We must not confuse the peoples with their governments.
Thomas Paine
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.
Thomas Paine
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.
Thomas Paine
Civilization, or that which is so called, has operated two ways to make one part of society more affluent and the other part more wretched than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.
Thomas Paine
Reason obeys itself and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
Thomas Paine
Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions.
Thomas Paine
Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.
Thomas Paine
Beware the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.
Thomas Paine
The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.
Thomas Paine
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.
Thomas Paine
Natural rights are those which always appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the rights of others.
Thomas Paine
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine
A government on the principles on which constitutional governments arising out of society are established, cannot have the right of altering itself. If it had, it would be arbitrary. It might make itself what it pleased and wherever such a right is set up, it shows there is no constitution.
Thomas Paine
Politics and self-interest have been so uniformly connected, that the world, from being so often deceived, has a right to be suspicious of public characters.
Thomas Paine
Men should not petition for rights, but take them
Thomas Paine
The times that tried men's souls are over-and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.
Thomas Paine
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.
Thomas Paine
The intimacy which is contracted in infancy, and friendship which is formed in misfortune, are, of all others, the most lasting and unalterable.
Thomas Paine
The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world not destitute of arms, for all would be alike but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside ... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them ... the weak will become prey to the strong.
Thomas Paine
The Bill of Rights should contain the general principles of natural and civil liberty. It should be to a community what the eternal laws and obligations of morality are to the conscience. It should be unalterable by any human power.
Thomas Paine
