They know no other influence than corruption and reckon all their probabilities from precedent.
Thomas Paine: “They know no other influence than corruption and reckon all their probabilities from precedent.”
Editor's note · Context
Paine criticizes British politicians for their narrow, self-serving approach to governance, relying on corruption and past examples rather than understanding human nature.
Share
More from Thomas Paine
The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole, are beginning to think.
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.
It would be better that nations should wi continue the pay of their soldiers during their lives, and give them their discharge and restore them to freedom and their friends, and cease recruiting, than retain such multitudes at the same …
Where these can have the opportunity of acting, opposition dies with fear, or crumbles away by conviction.