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When authors and critics talk of the sublime, they see not how nearly it borders on the ridiculous.
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
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Thetford
Norfolk
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Sublime
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Ridiculous
Critics
More quotes by Thomas Paine
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
The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.
Thomas Paine
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
The people of America are a people of property almost every man is a freeholder.
Thomas Paine
The mind, in discovering truths, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.
Thomas Paine
Virtue is not hereditary.
Thomas Paine
I know not whether taxes are raised to fight wars, or wars are fought in order to raise taxes.
Thomas Paine
All men can understand what representation is and that it must necessarily include a variety of knowledge and talents.
Thomas Paine
The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat.
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
We ought therefore to suspect that a great mass of information respecting the Bible, and the introduction of it into the world, has been suppressed by the united tyranny of Church and State, for the purpose of keeping people in ignorance, and which ought to be known.
Thomas Paine
It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention it is only the application of them that is human.
Thomas Paine
... in free countries the law ought to be King and there ought to be no other.
Thomas Paine
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.
Thomas Paine
Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government.
Thomas Paine
...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
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
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
Those who expect to reap the blessing of freedom must undertake to support it.
Thomas Paine
Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it.
Thomas Paine
