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An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.

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
Law
Misinterpret
Best
Punish
Even
Stretch
Always
Libertarian
Men
Leads
Laws
Dangerous
Liberty
Avidity

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Suspicion and persecution are weeds of the same dunghill, and flourish best together.
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Men did not make the earth... It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. ... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.
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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.
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We ought therefore to suspect that a great mass of information respecting the Bible, and the introduction of it into the world, has been suppressed by the united tyranny of Church and State, for the purpose of keeping people in ignorance, and which ought to be known.
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It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God.
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The people of America are a people of property almost every man is a freeholder.
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What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
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Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society.
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When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
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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.
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Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order.
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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.
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We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
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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.
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A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.
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The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.
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How necessary it is at all times to watch against the attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.
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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.
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