Thomas Paine: “But towards America she has observed no character at all; and destroyed by her conduct what she assumed in her title.”

It serves to keep up deceitful expectations which prevent people from looking into the defects and abuses of government.

Long experience however has shown, that reforms of this kind are not those which old governments wish to promote, and therefore it is to nations, and not to such governments, that these matters present themselves.

I presume, that though all the people of England pay taxes, not an hundredth part of them are electors, and the members of one of the houses of parliament represent nobody but themselves.

With how much more glory, and advantage to itself, does a nation act, when it exerts its powers to rescue the world from bondage, and to create itself friends, than when it employs those powers to increase ruin, desolation, and misery.