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Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority perfect equality affords no temptation.
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
Distinction
Temptation
Equality
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Perfect
Affords
Distinctions
Superiority
More quotes by Thomas Paine
Public credit is suspicion asleep.
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It is not the nature of avarice to be satisfied with anything but money. Every passion that acts upon mankind has a peculiar mode of operation. Many of them are temporary and fluctuating they admit of cessation and variety. But avarice is a fixed, uniform passion.
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And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.
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...It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
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The story of the whale swallowing Jonah, though a whale is large enough to do it, borders greatly on the marvelous but it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale.
Thomas Paine
Death is not the monarch for the dead, but of the dying. The moment he obtains a conquest he loses a subject.
Thomas Paine
There is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.
Thomas Paine
Reputation is what men and women think of us character is what God and angels know of us.
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
Lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind.
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Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
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...Thomas did not believe the resurrection [John 20:25], and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.
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We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and New Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries.
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To possess ourselves of a clear idea of what government is, or ought to be, we must trace it to its origin.
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It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God.
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The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature and in the few instances (for there are some in all countries) in whom nature, as by a miracle, has survived in aristocracy, those men despise it.
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Wrong cannot have a legal descendant.
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No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone.
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Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government.
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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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