118 quotes
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Common Sense (1776)
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.
Common Sense (1776)
Let me have none of your Popish stuff! Get away with you, good morning.
Such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness.
I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Let us maintain inviolably equality in the sacred right of suffrage: public security can never have a basis more solid.
Agrarian Justice (1797)
We profess, and we proclaim in peace, the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe.
Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Religion has two principal enemies, fanaticism and infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality, the other by natural philosophy.
Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
And the final event to himself has been, that, as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.
Letter to the Addressers (1792)
The universe is the bible of a true Theophilanthropist. It is there that he reads of God.
Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
I have no wish to believe on that subject.
This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
Eloquence may strike the ear, but the language of poverty strikes the heart; the first may charm like music, but the second alarms like a knell.
The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772)
These are the times that try men's souls.
The sublime and ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step below the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.
War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances ... that no human wisdom can calculate the end.
The Theophilanthropists do not call themselves the disciples of such or such a man. They avail themselves of the wise precepts that have been transmitted by writers of all countries and in all ages.
Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Human nature is not of itself vicious.
"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.