Browse 7 quotations connecting Thomas Paine with Community, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.