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

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Religion is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.
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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.
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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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Tears may soothe the wounds they cannot heal.
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To take away (voting) is to reduce a man to slavery.
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Titles are like a magicians wand which circumscribe human facility and prevent us from living the lives of man.
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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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Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil in its worst state, an intolerable one.
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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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And when we view a flag, which to the eye is beautiful, and to contemplate its rise and origin inspires a sensation of sublime delight, our national honor must unite with our interests to prevent injury to the one, or insult to the other.
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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.
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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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Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight most often, are within.
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Prejudice will fall in a combat with interest.
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I fear not, I see not reason for fear. In the end we will be the victors. For though at times the flame of liberty may cease to shine, the ember will never expire.
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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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As my object was not myself, I set out with the determination, and happily with the disposition, of not being moved by praise or censure, friendship or calumny, nor of being drawn from my purpose by any personal altercation and the man who cannot do this, is not fit for a public character.
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There is a happiness in Deism, when rightly understood, that is not to be found inany other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them.
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Moderation in temper is always a virtue but moderation in principle is always a vice.
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I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
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