Thomas Paine

I know not whether Homer or Euclid had sons; but I will venture an opinion that if they had, and had left their works unfinished, those sons could not have completed them.

Do we need a stronger evidence of the absurdity of hereditary government than is seen in the descendants of those men, in any line of life, who once were famous?

Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence.

It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed, Res-Publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally translated, the public thing.

It means arbitrary power in an individual person; in the exercise of which, himself, and not the res-publica, is the object.

Every government that does not act on the principle of a Republic, or in other words, that does not make the res-publica its whole and sole object, is not a good government.

But the government of America, which is wholly on the system of representation, is the only real Republic, in character and in practice, that now exists.

It admits not of a separation between knowledge and power, and is superior, as government always ought to be, to all the accidents of individual man, and is therefore superior to what is called monarchy.

All men can understand what representation is; and that it must necessarily include a variety of knowledge and talents.

Every succession is a revolution, and every regency a counter-revolution.

Those who have said that a republic is not a form of government calculated for countries of great extent, mistook, in the first place, the business of a government, for a form of government; for the res-publica equally appertains to every…

They destroy the right which they might have, by grounding it on a right which they cannot have.