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Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time.

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
Nature
Told
Reason
Millions
Believe
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Probable
Good
Courses
Skepticism
Never
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Time
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Atheism
Tell
Lies

More quotes by Thomas Paine

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Ignorance is of a peculiar nature once dispelled, it is impossible to reestablish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.
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When it becomes necessary to do a thing, the whole heart and soul should go into the measure, or not attempt it.
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No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond and when it bears no interest, is in no case a grievance.
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Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
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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.
Thomas Paine
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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
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He, who survives his reputation, lives out of despite himself, like a man listening to his own reproach.
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Therefore we say that a lying Spirit has been in the mouth of the writers of the books of the Bible.
Thomas Paine
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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.
Thomas Paine
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The final event to himself has been, that as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.
Thomas Paine
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Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
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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
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Public credit is suspicion asleep.
Thomas Paine
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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
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From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependant on His protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple?
Thomas Paine
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Now is the seedtime of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now, will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read in it full grown characters.
Thomas Paine
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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.
Thomas Paine
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It is the direction and not the magnitude which is to be taken into consideration.
Thomas Paine
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For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.
Thomas Paine
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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