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Wisdom is not the purchase of a day, and it is no wonder that we should err at the first setting off.
Thomas Paine
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Thomas Paine
Age: 72 †
Born: 1737
Born: January 29
Died: 1809
Died: June 8
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Entrepreneur
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Opinion Journalist
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More quotes by Thomas Paine
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
Thomas Paine
The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.
Thomas Paine
[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
THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD: And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man.
Thomas Paine
And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.
Thomas Paine
The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing.
Thomas Paine
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
The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.
Thomas Paine
Taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.
Thomas Paine
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.
Thomas Paine
It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.
Thomas Paine
The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax
Thomas Paine
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
Action and care will in time wear down the strongest frame, but guilt and melancholy are poisons of quick dispatch.
Thomas Paine
Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange believe that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies.
Thomas Paine
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.
Thomas Paine
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.
Thomas Paine
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Thomas Paine
Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and extravagances are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system. The foundation and superstructure of the government is bad. Prop it as you please, it continually sinks and ever will.
Thomas Paine
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.
Thomas Paine
