It has all the tracings and colorings of horror and despair; and excites the most swelling emotions of gratitude by exhibiting the miseries we are so graciously preserved from.
Thomas Paine: “It has all the tracings and colorings of horror and despair; and excites the most swelling emotions of gratitude by…”
Editor's note · Context
Paine reflects on the emotional impact of considering a hypothetical defeat, contrasting it with the gratitude for America's preservation.
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But where genuine principles of liberty pervade a people, every thing is restored to order; and the soldier civilly treated, returns the civility.
When men unite in agreeing that a thing is good, could it be obtained, such for instance as relief from a burden of taxes and the extinction of corruption, the object is more than half accomplished.
I have no idea, considering the reforms which are now passing and spreading throughout Europe, that England will permit herself to be the last; and where the occasion and the opportunity quietly offer, it is better than to wait for a…
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.