“Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime”-Thomas Paine One crucial component of maintaining a free society and Democratic Republic is the sense of responsibility of the people to maintain their own civil freedom and that of the society at large. The responsibility to participate at some level and remain aware of what their government …
Category Archives: Current Events
On Making it Easy vs. Making it Right
“Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.”-Thomas Paine, Common Sense History is replete with immediacies that made oppression of human rights and dignity convenient. There is little in the best of American history that lends itself much to convenience, but instead from the determined striving of the human …
On False Truths
“There is a general and striking difference between the genuine effects of truth itself, and the effects of falsehood believed to be truth. Truth is naturally benign; but false-hood believed to be truth is always furious. The former delights in serenity, is mild and persuasive, and seeks not the auxiliary aid of invention. The latter …
On the Dangers of Blind Trust, Irrational Loyalty, and Unaccountable Leaders
“When it is laid down as a maxim, that a king can do no wrong, it places him in a state of similar security with that of idiots and persons insane, and responsibility is out of the question with respect to himself.” Demanding blind loyalty and cronyism, shunning any criticism and persecuting the critic, allowing …
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On Bastille Day
“When the people fear the government, you have tyranny. When the government fears the people, you have freedom.” Bastille Day can not pass without remembering the role Thomas Paine had in the French revolution. From Part II of Thomas Paine’s series of essays The Rights of Man, Paine wrote this in 1792, three years after …
On Convictions, Messianic Missions, Delusions, and Accepting Reality in Iraq
“It is not our belief or disbelief that can make or unmake the fact.”-Thomas Paine, Age of Reason When a belief defies readily available facts, it becomes a delusion. I may believe I have lots of money in the bank, but to hold onto that belief given the fact of my bank balance would prescribe …
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On Celebrating Thomas Paine and the Spirit of ’76
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” -Thomas Paine, The American Crisis On the Fourth of July it is good to remember that all we take so very much for granted was not always so. Freedom from political tyranny was very much a matter …
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On the True Source of Political Power
All power exercised over a Nation must have some beginning. I must either be delegated or assumed. There are no other sources. All delegated power is turst, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.
-Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
On Defining Victory in Iraq
“There is something in a war carried on by invasion which makes it differ in circumstances from any other mode of war, because he who conducts it cannot tell whether the ground he gains, be for him, or against him, when he first makes it.” -Thomas Paine, The Crisis News Item: “US Forces Face Bloody …
On the Ongoing Saga of Alberto Gonzales and the Department of Justice
It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.
Thomas Paine