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Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.

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
Beyond
Grave
Cases
Ages
Age
Graves
Free
Vanity
Tyrannies
Must
Tyranny
Insolent
Every
Ridiculous
Preceded
Generation
Presumption
Generations
Governing

More quotes by Thomas Paine

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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
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The people of America are a people of property almost every man is a freeholder.
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A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
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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 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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Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
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The burden of the national debt consists not in its being so many millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continue the same, the burden of the national debt is the same to all intents and purposes, be the capital more or less.
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The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax
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If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent.
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Prejudice will fall in a combat with interest.
Thomas Paine
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It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.
Thomas Paine
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One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.
Thomas Paine
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The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy.
Thomas Paine
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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.
Thomas Paine
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The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation.
Thomas Paine
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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.
Thomas Paine
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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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Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.
Thomas Paine
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No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond and when it bears no interest, is in no case a grievance.
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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.
Thomas Paine