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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.

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
Either
Machinery
Whatever
Submit
Submits
Government
Opposites
Obeys
Reason
Easily
Bulk
Country
Ignorance
Dictated
Great
Mankind
Extensive
Influence
Rendered
Goes
Sufficiently

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My country is wherever liberty lives.
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When authors and critics talk of the sublime, they see not how nearly it borders on the ridiculous.
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Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it.
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The art of publicity is a black art but it has come to stay, and every year adds to its potency.
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The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
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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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There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure.
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What is it the Bible teaches us? - raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
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All Of Us Might Wish At Times That We Lived In A More Tranquil World....(yet) Our Times Are Challenging And Filled With Opportunity.
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[A]ll churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, are simply human inventions. They use fear to enslave us. They are a monopoly for power and profit.
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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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One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.
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It is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene.
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Beware the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.
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It will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded.
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Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order.
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Government is not a trade which any man or body of men has a right to set up and exercise for his own emolument, but is altogether a trust, in right of those by whom that trust is delegated, and by whom it is always resumable. It has of itself no rights they are altogether duties.
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Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority perfect equality affords no temptation.
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Let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarcy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King and there ought to be no other.
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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.
Thomas Paine