Quote

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

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
Prosaist
Writer
Thetford
Norfolk
Dresses
Bowers
Kings
Badge
Built
Badges
Lost
Palaces
Government
Ruins
Like
Innocence
Paradise
Dress

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It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.
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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.
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A government of our own is our natural right and when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance.
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Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured
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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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Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.
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There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure.
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Beware the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.
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It is from the power of taxation being in the hands of those who can throw so great a part of it from their own shoulders, that it has raged without a check.
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Wrong cannot have a legal descendant.
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The stupid texts of the Bible - from which, be the talents of the preacher what they may, only stupid sermons can be preached.
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Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight most often, are within.
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And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.
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The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy.
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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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We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
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Compassion, the fairest associate of the heart.
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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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