Browse quotations by Thomas Paine with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Focused collections bring together quotations from this author around one recurring idea.
“Time makes more converts than reason.”
Ideas that initially provoke resistance can become easier to accept as experience changes what people consider normal or possible.
Source note: Common Sense, Introduction; Paine follows his observation about long habits making wrong practices appear right.
“The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.”
The line emphasizes the scale and future consequences of the political choice Paine believed his contemporaries faced.
Source note: Common Sense, discussion of the present state of American affairs; Paine immediately expands the issue from one locality to a continent and posterity.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Political change is framed as a rare opportunity to build institutions deliberately rather than merely inherit arrangements from the past.
Source note: Common Sense; Paine makes the claim while arguing that independence created an unusual opening to form a new constitution.
“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
Paine enlarges a local political conflict into a broader argument about principles that affect people beyond one country or generation.
Source note: Common Sense, Introduction; the sentence opens Paine’s attempt to frame the colonial dispute in universal rather than merely local terms.
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
Custom can disguise error by making the familiar feel legitimate; critical judgment requires re-examining practices that have escaped scrutiny through repetition.
Source note: Common Sense, Introduction; Paine uses the observation to explain the resistance that unfamiliar political arguments may initially provoke.
“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.”
Paine distinguishes voluntary social cooperation from coercive government, treating political authority as a tool justified by necessity rather than an intrinsic good.
Source note: Common Sense, section on the origin and design of government; the passage contrasts society’s constructive role with government’s restraining function.
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
Paine places moral allegiance beyond national or sectarian identity, presenting humanity at large and practical good-doing as more fundamental than loyalty to a particular place or religious label.
Source note: Rights of Man, Part II, Project Gutenberg public-domain collection #3742. The line appears in Paine’s statement of independence from place or person while criticizing hereditary political privilege. The exact text is “my country is the world, and my religion is to do good,” not the later expanded attribution “all mankind are my brethren.”
“Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.”
Paine attributes much social conflict to institutions and inherited political systems rather than treating hostility as an unavoidable feature of human nature.
Source note: Rights of Man, Part II; represented from the Conway public-domain collection.
“Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government.”
Paine argues that everyday social order also grows from mutual dependence, custom, exchange, and cooperation rather than being created entirely by government.
Source note: Rights of Man, Part II; the surrounding passage attributes much ordinary social coordination to society itself.
“The government of a free country, properly speaking, is not in the persons, but in the laws.”
The principle shifts legitimacy from rulers as personalities to laws and institutions that bind public authority.
Source note: Rights of Man, Part II; historical political argument about representative government and the rule of law.
“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person.”
Paine presents independence of judgment as personally valuable because it allows principles to be considered without automatic deference to status, nationality, or person.
Source note: Rights of Man; this sentence precedes Paine’s well-known cosmopolitan statement about country and doing good.
“Such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks,—and all it wants,—is the liberty of appearing.”
Paine links truth with open expression, arguing that its central requirement is the opportunity to be heard rather than protection from scrutiny.
Source note: Rights of Man; represented in the public-domain Conway edition and kept in the work’s polemical political context.
“A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution.”
Paine distinguishes the people’s constituting authority from the government created under it, rejecting the idea that government can simply define its own limits.
Source note: Rights of Man; Paine’s constitutional argument is preserved as historical political theory rather than converted into generic motivation.
“Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.”
Paine makes rights reciprocal: claiming a right for oneself entails recognizing and defending the same right in others.
Source note: Rights of Man, Part I; represented through Moncure Daniel Conway’s public-domain Project Gutenberg collection.
“My own mind is my own church.”
The compact statement places personal conscience and reason above compulsory religious institutions in Paine’s deistic argument.
Source note: The Age of Reason, Part I, Chapter I; Paine’s religious position is historical deism and should not be flattened into a generic anti-institution slogan.
“It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself.”
Paine connects intellectual integrity with well-being: professing beliefs one does not actually hold creates an inward conflict between conscience and public conformity.
Source note: The Age of Reason, Part I, Chapter I; the surrounding passage discusses mental fidelity and unbelief.
“I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.”
Paine’s profession of faith combines deistic belief with an ethical emphasis on equality, justice, mercy, and the practical happiness of other people.
Source note: The Age of Reason, Part I, Chapter I, “The Author’s Profession of Faith”; represented from the Conway Project Gutenberg edition.
“These are the times that try men's souls.”
Crisis reveals commitment because principles become costly to maintain precisely when fear, fatigue, and uncertainty make retreat easier.
Source note: Opening of The American Crisis No. I; Paine addresses perseverance during a difficult stage of the American Revolution.