Thomas Paine - Rights of Man (1791)

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I compare it [monarchy] to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.

Thomas Paine
A nation under a well regulated government, should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.

Thomas Paine
When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, then may the country boast of its constitution and its government.

Thomas Paine
The greatest characters the world has known, have rose on the democratic floor. Aristocracy has not been able to keep a proportionate pace with democracy.

Thomas Paine
It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions.

Thomas Paine
Lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind.

Thomas Paine
The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.

Thomas Paine
Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous conscientiousness of honor. It is not the produce of riches only, but of the hard earnings of labor and poverty. It is drawn even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not a beggar passes, or perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that mass.

Thomas Paine
[Burke] is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.

Thomas Paine
That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true...

Thomas Paine
The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.

Thomas Paine
When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.

Thomas Paine
The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature; and in the few instances (for there are some in all countries) in whom nature, as by a miracle, has survived in aristocracy, those men despise it.

Thomas Paine
A little matter will move a party, but it must be something great that moves a nation.

Thomas Paine
All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny…To inherit a government, is to inherit the people, as if they were flocks and herds.

Thomas Paine
Titles are but nick-names, and every nick-name is a title.

Thomas Paine
Statues of marble or brass will perish; and statues made in imitation of them are not the same statues,... But print and reprint a thought a thousand times over, and that with materials of any kind... the thought is eternally and identically the same thought in every case.

Thomas Paine
Call to mind the sentiments which nature has engraved on the heart of every citizen, and which take a new force when they are solemnly recognised by all:-For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it.

Thomas Paine
Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

Thomas Paine
The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.

Thomas Paine
To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not.

Thomas Paine
What were formerly called revolutions were little more than a change of persons…what we now see in the world, from the revolutions of America and France, is a renovation of the natural order of things.

Thomas Paine
There is an unnatural unfitness in an aristocracy to be legislators for a nation. Their ideas of distributive justice are corrupted at the very source. They begin life trampling on all their younger brothers and sisters, and relations of every kind, and are taught and educated so to do. With what ideas of justice or honor can that man enter a house of legislation, who absorbs in his own person the inheritance of a whole family of children, or metes out some pitiful portion with the insolence of a gift?

Thomas Paine
Aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species.

Thomas Paine
Reason, like time, will make its own way, and prejudice will fall in a combat with interest.

Thomas Paine
Aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice.

Thomas Paine
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.

Thomas Paine
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice.

Thomas Paine
It is for the good of nations, and not for the emolument or aggrandizement of particular individuals, that government ought to be established, and that mankind are at the expense of supporting it. The defects of every government and constitution both as to principle and form, must, on a parity of reasoning, be as open to discussion as the defects of a law, and it is a duty which every man owes to society to point them out.

Thomas Paine
With respect to the two Houses, of which the English Parliament is composed, they appear to be effectually influenced into one, and as a legislature, to have no temper of its own. The Minister, whoever he at any time may be, touches it as with an opium wand, and it sleeps obedience.

Thomas Paine