Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
Thomas Painewas an English-American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era rhetoric of transnational human rights. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination"...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth29 January 1736
CityThetford, England
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Better fare hard with good men than feast it with bad.
In a chariot of light from the region of the day, the Goddess of Liberty came. She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love, the plant she named Liberty Tree.
When my country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.
We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.
Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
Is it popular to pay our debts, to do justice, to defend the injured and insulted country, to protect the aged and the infant, and give top liberty a land to live in? Then must taxation, as the means by which these things are done, be popular likewi
These are times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking, and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord