Jan 1, 1791
This species of imaginary consequence has visibly declined in every part of Europe, and it hastens to its exit as the world of reason continues to rise.
Thomas Paine
The Public Record
Thomas Paine was an English-born American Founding Father, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman. His pamphlets Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783) framed the Patriot argument for independence from Great Britain at the outset of the American Revolution. Paine advanced Enlightenment-era arguments for human rights that shaped revolutionary discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Jan 1, 1791
There is no occasion to take titles away, for they take themselves away when society concurs to ridicule them.
Jan 1, 1791
It is common opinion only that makes them anything, or nothing, or worse than nothing.
Jan 1, 1791
If a whole country is disposed to hold them in contempt, all their value is gone, and none will own them.
Jan 1, 1791
Imagination has given figure and character to centaurs, satyrs, and down to all the fairy tribe; but titles baffle even the powers of fancy, and are a chimerical nondescript.
Jan 1, 1791
What respect then can be paid to that which describes nothing, and which means nothing?
Jan 1, 1791
Whether they mean strength or weakness, wisdom or folly, a child or a man, or the rider or the horse, is all equivocal.
Jan 1, 1791
Through all the vocabulary of Adam there is not such an animal as a Duke or a Count; neither can we connect any certain ideas with the words.
Jan 1, 1791
He lives immured within the Bastille of a word, and surveys at a distance the envied life of man.
Jan 1, 1791
Titles are like circles drawn by the magician's wand, to contract the sphere of man's felicity.
Jan 1, 1791
The genuine mind of man, thirsting for its native home, society, contemns the gewgaws that separate him from it.
Jan 1, 1791
Even those who possessed them have disowned the gibberish, and as they outgrew the rickets, have despised the rattle.