Rights of Man Quotes by Thomas Paine: Context & Meanings

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.”

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.

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

Rights of Man, Part II; historical political argument about representative government and the rule of law.

Rights of Man; this sentence precedes Paine’s well-known cosmopolitan statement about country and doing good.

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

Rights of Man; Paine’s constitutional argument is preserved as historical political theory rather than converted into generic motivation.

Rights of Man, Part I; represented through Moncure Daniel Conway’s public-domain Project Gutenberg collection.