Thomas Paine

Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few.

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights.

Knowing my own heart and feeling myself as I now do, superior to all the skirmish of party, the inveteracy of interested or mistaken opponents, I answer not to falsehood or abuse, but proceed to the defects of the English Government.

I know the value of moral instruction, and I have seen the danger of the contrary.

Fortified with that proud integrity, that disdains to triumph or to yield, I will advocate the Rights of Man.

The millions that are superfluously wasted upon governments are more than sufficient to reform those evils, and to benefit the condition of every man in a nation, not included within the purlieus of a court.

Bred up without morals, and cast upon the world without a prospect, they are the exposed sacrifice of vice and legal barbarity.

Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor?

Instead of this, the resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, impostors and prostitutes; and even the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses…

Civil government does not exist in executions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youth and the support of age, as to exclude, as much as possible, profligacy from the one and despair from the other.

It would seem, by the exterior appearance of such countries, that all was happiness; but there lies hidden from the eye of common observation, a mass of wretchedness, that has scarcely any other chance, than to expire in poverty or infamy.

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