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Government without a constitution, is a power without a right.

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
Government
Without
Right
Constitution

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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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We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest truest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
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But such is the irresistable nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.
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He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to Defender of the Faith, than George the Third.
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The New Testament rests itself for credulity and testimony on what are called prophecies in the Old Testament, of the person called Jesus Christ and if there are no such things as prophecies of any such person in the Old Testament, the New Testament.
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If there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.
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The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
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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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Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it.
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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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On this question of war, three things are to be considered. First, the right of declaring it: secondly, the expense of supporting it: thirdly, the mode of conducting it after it is declared.
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The Book of Job and the 19th Psalm, which even the Church admits to be more ancient than the chronological order in which they stand in the book called the Bible, are theological orations conformable to the original system of theology.
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Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
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But where, says some, is the King of America? I'll tell you. Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain.
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The intimacy which is contracted in infancy, and friendship which is formed in misfortune, are, of all others, the most lasting and unalterable.
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Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time.
Thomas Paine
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What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
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Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection.
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Priests and conjurors are of the same trade.
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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.
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