Browse 10 quotations connecting Thomas Paine with Thinking, 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 Rights of Man, Common Sense, 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 Rights of Man, Common Sense, The Age of 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 note: Common Sense, Introduction; Paine follows his observation about long habits making wrong practices appear 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 note: Common Sense, Introduction; Paine uses the observation to explain the resistance that unfamiliar political arguments may initially provoke.
“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.
“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.