Thomas Paine: “It is the popery of government; a thing kept up to amuse the ignorant, and quiet them into taxes.”

The man who is in the receipt of a million a year is the last person to promote a spirit of reform, lest, in the event, it should reach to himself.

Many of the facts were in themselves principles; such as the declaration of American Independence, and the treaty of alliance between France and America, which recognised the natural rights of man, and justified resistance to oppression.

Man cannot, properly speaking, make circumstances for his purpose, but he always has it in his power to improve them when they occur, and this was the case in France.

It was a sort of new form of government that insensibly served to put the old one out of sight and to unhinge it from the superstitious authority of antiquity.