Quote

The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.

Thomas Paine

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Consists
Resistance
Motivation
Strength
Fear
Political
Despotism
Power
Wholly
Tyrants

More quotes by Thomas Paine

Image
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.
Thomas Paine
Image
There is a happiness in Deism, when rightly understood, that is not to be found inany other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them.
Thomas Paine
Image
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
Image
Character is much easier kept than recovered.
Thomas Paine
Image
... in free countries the law ought to be King and there ought to be no other.
Thomas Paine
Image
Now, which am I to believe, a book that any impostor might make and call the Word of God, or the creation itself which none but an Almighty Power could make? For the Bible says one thing and the creation says the contrary. The Bible represents God with all the passions of a mortal, and the creation proclaims him with all the attributes of a God.
Thomas Paine
Image
What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
Thomas Paine
Image
Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.
Thomas Paine
Image
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.
Thomas Paine
Image
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.
Thomas Paine
Image
Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.
Thomas Paine
Image
Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches and tho' avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.
Thomas Paine
Image
Human nature is not of itself vicious.
Thomas Paine
Image
If anything had or could have a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust and calculated to support fraud and oppression.
Thomas Paine
Image
It is the direction and not the magnitude which is to be taken into consideration.
Thomas Paine
Image
It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance.
Thomas Paine
Image
The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the certainty of His existence and the immutability of His power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries.
Thomas Paine
Image
Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins and you will have sins in abundance.
Thomas Paine
Image
It is important that we should never lose sight of this distinction. We must not confuse the peoples with their governments.
Thomas Paine
Image
We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.
Thomas Paine