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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
Author
Entrepreneur
Journalist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Prosaist
Writer
Thetford
Norfolk
Wisdom
Firsts
First
Purchase
Settings
Setting
Wonder

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Prophesying is lying professionally.
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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.
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Every religion is good that teaches man to be good and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.
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Action and care will in time wear down the strongest frame, but guilt and melancholy are poisons of quick dispatch.
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...the true greatness of a nation is founded on principles of humanity.
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Civilization, or that which is so called, has operated two ways to make one part of society more affluent and the other part more wretched than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.
Thomas Paine
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But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes?
Thomas Paine
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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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I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state up and help us lay your shoulders to the wheel better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake.
Thomas Paine
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Titles do not count with posterity.
Thomas Paine
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Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine
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A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.
Thomas Paine
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Government has no right to make itself a party in any debates respecting the principles or mode of forming or of changing, constitutions. It is not for the benefit of those who exercise the powers of government, that constitutions, and the governments issuing from them, are established.
Thomas Paine
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His [Jesus'] historians, having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground.
Thomas Paine
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It is a general idea, that when taxes are once laid on, they are never taken off.
Thomas Paine
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An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.
Thomas Paine
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When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
Thomas Paine
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Every Tory is a coward for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.
Thomas Paine
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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.
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