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Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.

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
Power
Subdue
Hath
Defend
Liberty
Common
Sense
Tell
Endeavoured
Others
Improper

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The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
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We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
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Suspicion and persecution are weeds of the same dunghill, and flourish best together.
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The people of America are a people of property almost every man is a freeholder.
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To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
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Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and extravagances are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system. The foundation and superstructure of the government is bad. Prop it as you please, it continually sinks and ever will.
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The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow.
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Reason obeys itself and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
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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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It may perhaps be said that it signifies nothing to a man what is done to him after he is dead but it signifies much to the living it either tortures their feelings or hardens their hearts.
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A nation under a well regulated government, should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.
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Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority perfect equality affords no temptation.
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Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.
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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.
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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.
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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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Man did not make the earth, and though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity, any part of it.
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What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
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