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The representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom where it can be found.

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
Calculated
Politics
Representative
Law
Wisest
Found
Collecting
Political
Representatives
Government
Laws
Produce
System

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All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
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To take away (voting) is to reduce a man to slavery.
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A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.
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Government without a constitution, is a power without a right.
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...Thomas did not believe the resurrection [John 20:25], and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.
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It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.
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There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred.
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It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
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Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
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We repose an unwise confidence in any government, or in any men, when we invest them officially with too much, or an unnecessary quantity of, discretionary power.
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It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.
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Compassion, the fairest associate of the heart.
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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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Time makes more converts than reason.
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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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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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I die content, I die for the liberty of my country.
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Those who expect to reap the blessing of freedom must undertake to support it.
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The aristocracy are not the farmers who work the land, and raise the produce, but are the mere consumers of the rent and when compared with the active world, are the drones, a seraglio of males, who neither collect the honey nor form the hive, but exist only for lazy enjoyment.
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I disbelieve all holy men and holy books.
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