The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.
- Topic: Freedom, Liberty
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Thomas Paine
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace, and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.
'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.
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Either you will control your government, or government will control you.
Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
O beautiful for spacious skies, For Amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
Let us remind ourselves that it is ordinary people – men and women, boys and girls – that make the world a special place.
To change your mind and to follow him who sets you straight is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.
A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.
If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly would if such a right were a vital one.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
They [the Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.
Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.
A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
Racial discrimination is not a permissible solution... that can only weaken the principle of equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Equal Protection Clause.
Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.
