Quotes from Thomas Paine
Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.
- Thomas Paine
And this manner of speaking of the Almighty, as one would speak of a man, is consistent with nothing but the stupidity of the Bible.
- Thomas Paine
The Word of God is the creation we behold. And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man.
- Thomas Paine
There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state. The construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity.
- Thomas Paine
Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous consciousness of honor.
- Thomas Paine
All churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, are simply human inventions. They use fear to enslave us. They are a monopoly for power and profit.
- Thomas Paine
The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
- 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
What is called a republic, is not any particular form of government ... it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which means arbitrary power.
- Thomas Paine
A Constitution is not the act of a Government, but of a people constituting a government, and a government without a constitution is a power without right.
- Thomas Paine
The balance of power is the scale of peace.
- 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