Thomas Paine

Among others, it shows that a government may be in a state of insolvency and a nation rich.

A government may be said to be insolvent every time it applies to the nation to discharge its arrears.

The devotees and penitent debauchees, extortioners and misers of former days, to ensure themselves a better world than that they were about to leave, had bequeathed immense property in trust to the priesthood for pious uses; and the…

From the Revolutions of America and France, and the symptoms that have appeared in other countries, it is evident that the opinion of the world is changing with respect to systems of Government, and that revolutions are not within the…

When those defects, and the means of remedying them, are generally seen by a nation, that nation will reform its government or its constitution in the one case, as the government repealed or reformed the law in the other.

It is better that the whole argument should come out than to seek to stifle it.

I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe.

If better reasons can be shown for them than against them, they will stand; if the contrary, they will not.

What is the history of all monarchical governments but a disgustful picture of human wretchedness, and the accidental respite of a few years' repose?

Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind.

Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

Everything in the English government appears to me the reverse of what it ought to be, and of what it is said to be.