A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
The choicest gift of God to man, the gift of reason; and having endeavoured to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason; as if man could give reason to himself.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of reason as a divine gift and critiques the denial of its significance in favor of imposed beliefs.
In this quote, Thomas Paine reflects on the inherent value of reason as a precious gift bestowed upon humanity by God. He suggests that when individuals attempt to suppress their natural reasoning in favor of accepted dogmas or beliefs that contradict reason, they not only betray their own intellect but also fail to recognize that reason is an intrinsic part of being human, rather than something that can be created or bestowed by oneself.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the importance of critical thinking, this quote serves as a reminder to value reason over dogma.
More from Thomas Paine
All quotes →That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
I consider the war of America against Britain as the country's war, the public's war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property.
Had the news of salvation by Jesus Christ been inscribed on the face of the sun and the moon, in characters that all nations would have understood, the whole earth had known it in twenty-four hours, and all nations would have believed it; whereas, though it is now almost two thousand years since, as they tell us, Christ came upon earth, not a twentieth part of the people of the earth know anything of it, and among those who do, the wiser part do not believe it.
The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
To reason with goverments, as they have existed for ages, is to argue with brutes. It is only from the nations themselves that reforms can be expected
Similar quotes
Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.
Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken for anything other than a toy.
If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
We must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day had been.