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Thomas Paine Quotes About Mind

Browse 6 quotations connecting Thomas Paine with Mind, with meanings, source notes and related themes.

Sources

Where these mind quotations appear

Sources represented here include Rights of Man, Common Sense, The Age of Reason.

6 shown
Quotations

6 matching quotations with meanings and source context

Source identified1
Time makes more converts than reason.

“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 details

Common Sense (1776), Introduction. The represented wording is verified in Project Gutenberg #147 and the validated scan-backed Wikisource 1776 sixth-edition transcription; Paine follows his warning that custom can make an error look right by observing that time often changes opinion where argument initially does not.

Source identified2
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

“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 details

Common Sense (1776), Introduction. The represented opening sentence is verified in Project Gutenberg #147 and the validated scan-backed Wikisource transcription; Paine argues that familiarity can make a wrong practice appear right before public argument unsettles the custom.

Source identified3
Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.

“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 details

Rights of Man, Part I, Conclusion; represented from Moncure Daniel Conway’s public-domain Project Gutenberg #3742 collection. The passage attributes national hostility to old systems of government rather than to an inevitable enmity between people.

Source identified4
Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government.

“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 details

Rights of Man, Part II; the surrounding passage attributes much ordinary social coordination to society itself.

Source identified5
Such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks,—and all it wants,—is the liberty of appearing.

“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 details

Rights of Man; represented in the public-domain Conway edition and kept in the work’s polemical political context.

Source identified6
My own mind is my own church.

“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 details

The Age of Reason, Part I, Chapter I, “The Author’s Profession of Faith”; Moncure Daniel Conway collected/edited text represented by Project Gutenberg #3743 and cross-checked against Wikisource. “My own mind is my own church” follows Paine’s rejection of compulsory institutional creeds and states his historical deist emphasis on individual conscience and reason; this collection does not flatten it into a context-free rejection of all community, worship or institutions.

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