Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.
Thomas Paine
Category Archives: Thomas Paine in Today’s World
On Trying Too Hard to Tell the Truth
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 falsehood 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 sticks at nothing.
Thomas Paine
On the Toll of War
It is not among the least of the calamities of a long continued war, that it unhinges the mind from those nice sensations which at other times appear so amiable. The continued spectacle of woe, blunts the finer feelings, and the necessity of bearing with the sight, moral obligations of society weakened, till the custom of acting by necessity, becomes and apology where it is truly a crime.
Thomas Paine, The Crisis
On Patriotism and its Disguise
Apostasy stalked through the land in the garb of patriotism, and the torch of treason blinded for a while the flame of liberty.
On Four Years of War in Iraq
O ye partial ministers of your own acknowledged principals. If the bearing arms be sinful, the first going to war must be more so, by all the difference between wilful attack and unavoidable defence. Wherefore, if ye really preach from conscience, and mean not to make a political hobbyhorse of your religion, convince the world thereof, by proclaiming your doctrine to our enemies, for they likewise bear ARMS.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense
On Concern for the Present State of the Military and Its Missions
The weaker any cord is the less will it bear to be stretched, and the worse is the policy to stretch it, unless it is intended to break it.
-Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
On Keeping an Open Mind
I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
-Thomas Paine, Age of Reason
On Darfur
For that which is a disgrace to human nature, throws something of a shade over all the human character, and each individual feels his share of the wound that is given to the whole.
-Thomas Paine
On Patience and Understanding Among Reasonable People
There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.
-Thomas Paine
On Saving the Elephant
“The most effectual method to keep men honest is to enable them to live so. The tenderness of conscience is too often overmatched by the sharpness of want; and principle, like chastity, yields with just reluctance enough to excuse itself.” Immediately after a 1989 international trade ban on ivory, illegal elephant poaching was nearly stopped …