Quote

The Bill of Rights should contain the general principles of natural and civil liberty. It should be to a community what the eternal laws and obligations of morality are to the conscience. It should be unalterable by any human power.

Thomas Paine

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Liberty
Obligation
Rights
Bills
Law
Morality
Community
Conscience
Unalterable
Natural
Laws
Obligations
Power
General
Contain
Human
Eternal
Bill
Humans
Principles
Civil

More quotes by Thomas Paine

Image
The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.
Thomas Paine
Image
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
Image
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.
Thomas Paine
Image
Titles are like a magicians wand which circumscribe human facility and prevent us from living the lives of man.
Thomas Paine
Image
There is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.
Thomas Paine
Image
What is it the Bible teaches us? - raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
Thomas Paine
Image
And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.
Thomas Paine
Image
...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.
Thomas Paine
Image
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself.
Thomas Paine
Image
It is the direction and not the magnitude which is to be taken into consideration.
Thomas Paine
Image
If anything had or could have a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust and calculated to support fraud and oppression.
Thomas Paine
Image
No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone.
Thomas Paine
Image
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
Image
The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense.
Thomas Paine
Image
The moral duty of man consists of imitatingthe moral goodness and beneficence of God,manifested in the creation, toward all His creatures.
Thomas Paine
Image
...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
Image
It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God.
Thomas Paine
Image
Government is not a trade which any man or body of men has a right to set up and exercise for his own emolument, but is altogether a trust, in right of those by whom that trust is delegated, and by whom it is always resumable. It has of itself no rights they are altogether duties.
Thomas Paine
Image
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
Thomas Paine
Image
There is a happiness in Deism, when rightly understood, that is not to be found inany other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them.
Thomas Paine