Thomas Paine - Rights of Man (1791)

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When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.

Thomas Paine
To possess ourselves of a clear idea of what government is, or ought to be, we must trace it to its origin.

Thomas Paine
The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason.

Thomas Paine
All men can understand what representation is; and that it must necessarily include a variety of knowledge and talents.

Thomas Paine
It can only be by blinding the understanding of man, and making him believe that government is some wonderful mysterious thing, that excessive revenues are obtained. Monarchy is well calculated to ensure this end. It is the popery of government; a thing kept up to amuse the ignorant, and quiet them into taxes.

Thomas Paine
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
If any generation of men ever possessed the right of dictating the mode by which the world should be governed for ever, it was the first generation that existed; and if that generation did it not, no succeeding generation can show any authority for doing it, nor can set any up.

Thomas Paine
No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of it being right.

Thomas Paine
The graceful pride of truth knows no extremes, and preserves, in every latitude of life, the right-angled character of man.

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
The continual whine of lamenting the burden of taxes, however successfully it may be practiced in mixed governments, is inconsistent with the sense and spirit of a republic. If taxes are necessary, they are of course advantageous, but if they require an apology, the apology itself implies an impeachment. Why, then, is man imposed upon, or why does he impose upon himself?

Thomas Paine
As my object was not myself, I set out with the determination, and happily with the disposition, of not being moved by praise or censure, friendship or calumny, nor of being drawn from my purpose by any personal altercation; and the man who cannot do this, is not fit for a public character.

Thomas Paine
What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.

Thomas Paine
It is a general idea, that when taxes are once laid on, they are never taken off.

Thomas Paine
It is from the power of taxation being in the hands of those who can throw so great a part of it from their own shoulders, that it has raged without a check.

Thomas Paine
They took care to represent government as a thing made up of mysteries, which only themselves understood, and they hid from the understanding of the nation, the only thing that was beneficial to know, namely, that government is nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of society.

Thomas Paine
It requires but a very small glance of thought to perceive, that although laws made in one generation often continue in force through succeeding generations, yet that they continue to derive their force from the consent of the living. A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non repealing passes for consent.

Thomas Paine
Politics and self-interest have been so uniformly connected, that the world, from being so often deceived, has a right to be suspicious of public characters.

Thomas Paine
When it becomes necessary to do a thing, the whole heart and soul should go into the measure, or not attempt it.

Thomas Paine
In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.

Thomas Paine
If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced state of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude.

Thomas Paine
There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.

Thomas Paine
A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.

Thomas Paine
A body of men, holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by any body.

Thomas Paine
[In France] all that class of equivocal generation, which in some countries is called aristocracy, and in others nobility, is done away, and the peer is exalted into man.

Thomas Paine
A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.

Thomas Paine
When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government.

Thomas Paine
The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of man change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.

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 laureate.

Thomas Paine
It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

Thomas Paine