With us, you have forfeited all pretensions to reputation, and it is only by holding you like a wild beast, afraid of your keepers, that you can be made manageable.
Thomas Paine: “With us, you have forfeited all pretensions to reputation, and it is only by holding you like a wild beast, afraid of…”
Editor's note · Context
In a letter to Sir Guy Carleton during the American Revolution, Paine asserts that the British have lost all honor and must be controlled by force.
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Nations, like individuals, who have long been enemies, without knowing each other, or knowing why, become the better friends when they discover the errors and impositions under which they had acted.
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.
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…