A constitution defines and limits the powers of the government it creates. It therefore follows, as a natural and also a logical result, that the governmental exercise of any power not authorized by the constitution is an assumed power, and therefore illegal.

— Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine Quotes

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

— Thomas Paine

If there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.

— Thomas Paine

But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes?

— Thomas Paine

Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.

— Thomas Paine

And when we view a flag, which to the eye is beautiful, and to contemplate its rise and origin inspires a sensation of sublime delight, our national honor must unite with our interests to prevent injury to the one, or insult to the other.

— Thomas Paine

Prejudice, like the spider, makes everywhere its home. It has neither taste nor choice of place, and all that it requires is room. If the one prepares her food by poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other does the same. Prejudice may be denominated the spider of the mind.

— Thomas Paine

Those who knew Benjamin Franklin will recollect that his mind was forever young, his temper ever serene; science, that never grows gray, was always his mistress. He was never without an object, for when we cease to have an object, we become like an invalid in a hospital waiting for death.

— Thomas Paine

Action and care will in time wear down the strongest frame, but guilt and melancholy are poisons of quick dispatch.

— Thomas Paine

Aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice.

— Thomas Paine

If thou trusteth to the book called the Scriptures, thou trusteth to the rotten staff of fables and falsehood.

— Thomas Paine
Book

War is the gambling table of governments, and citizens the dupes of the game.

— Thomas Paine

Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government. Instead, therefore, of exclaiming against the ambition of kings, the exclamation should be directed against the principle of such governments; and instead of seeking to reform the individual, the wisdom of a nation should apply itself to reform the system.

— 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
Country

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

A single legislature, on account of the superabundance of its power, and the uncontrolled rabidity of its execution, becomes as dangerous to the principles of liberty as that of a despotic monarch.

— Thomas Paine

Aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species.

— Thomas Paine

The New Testament rests itself for credulity and testimony on what are called prophecies in the Old Testament, of the person called Jesus Christ; and if there are no such things as prophecies of any such person in the Old Testament, the New Testament.

— Thomas Paine

Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security.

— Thomas Paine

Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

— Thomas Paine

No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond; and when it bears no interest, is in no case a grievance.

— Thomas Paine
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