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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.

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
Every
Hundred
Quantity
Years
Pay
Consists
Millions
Capital
Year
Burden
Interest
Debt
Purpose
National
Intents
Less
Continue
Collected
Many
Taxes
Purposes

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Government without a constitution, is a power without a right.
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The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.
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These are the times that try men's souls.
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Commerce diminishes the spirit, both of patriotism and military defence.
Thomas Paine
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Ah, reader, put thy trust in thy creator, and thou wilt be safe but if thou trustest to the book called the scriptures thou trustest to the rotten staff of fable and falsehood.
Thomas Paine
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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.
Thomas Paine
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It is important that we should never lose sight of this distinction. We must not confuse the peoples with their governments.
Thomas Paine
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It may perhaps be said that it signifies nothing to a man what is done to him after he is dead but it signifies much to the living it either tortures their feelings or hardens their hearts.
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The case, however, is, that the Bible will not bear examination in any part of it, which it would do if it was the Word of God. Those who most believe it are those who know least about it, and priests always take care to keep the inconsistent and contradictory parts out of sight.
Thomas Paine
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I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature, which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered and the easier repaired when disordered.
Thomas Paine
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I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine
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Virtue is not hereditary.
Thomas Paine
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...the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
Thomas Paine
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Wrong cannot have a legal descendant.
Thomas Paine
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Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion.
Thomas Paine
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Politics and self-interest have been so uniformly connected, that the world, from being so often deceived, has a right to be suspicious of public characters.
Thomas Paine
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Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight most often, are within.
Thomas Paine
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Therefore we say that a lying Spirit has been in the mouth of the writers of the books of the Bible.
Thomas Paine
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It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention it is only the application of them that is human.
Thomas Paine
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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.
Thomas Paine