Thomas Paine: “How easy it is to abuse truth and language, when men, by habitual wickedness, have learned to set justice at defiance.”

He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.

He writes neither in the character of a Frenchman nor an Englishman, but in the fawning character of that creature known in all countries, and a friend to none--a courtier.

Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence.

But the spirit of the nation was not to be overcome, and it was so fully sensible of the strong ground it had taken--that of withholding taxes--that it contented itself with keeping up a sort of quiet resistance, which effectually…