Browse 6 quotations connecting Thomas Paine with Courage, 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 American Crisis No. I. 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 American Crisis No. I.
“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.
“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.
“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.