Paine, Thomas

"Character is much easier kept than recovered."

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit."

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."

"Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us."

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression."

"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it."

"There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord."

"When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary."

"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one." - Common Sense

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it." - The American Crisis