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When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind of corruption generates and forms.

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
Politics
Corruption
Individual
Round
Political
Rounds
Form
Center
Power
Forms
Government
Extraordinary
Every
Pay
Allotted
Kind
Becomes
Generates

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Prophesying is lying professionally.
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The people of America are a people of property almost every man is a freeholder.
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Is it because you are sunk in the cruelty of superstition, or feel no interest in the honor of your Creator, that you listen to the horrid tales of the Bible, or hear them with callous indifference?
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Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins and you will have sins in abundance.
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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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Titles do not count with posterity.
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Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it.
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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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It is unpleasant to see character throw itself away.
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Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order.
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The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.
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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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A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.
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The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points--his duty God, which every man must feel and, with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by.
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Mingling religion with politics may be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.
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Tears may soothe the wounds they cannot heal.
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... a thirst for power is the natural disease of monarchy.
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An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.
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The representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom where it can be found.
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