A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
Thomas PaineRead
How necessary it is at all times to watch against the attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of vigilance against the abuse of power.
Thomas Paine highlights the critical need for perpetual awareness and caution regarding the potential for power to overreach and become excessive. This idea serves as a reminder that societies must actively monitor authority to prevent tyranny and ensure that power does not infringe upon individual freedoms and rights.
Themes
PowerVigilanceLibertyAuthorityExcess
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech addressing government accountability, one might say, 'As Thomas Paine asserted, we must watch against the attempted encroachment of power.'
More from Thomas Paine
All quotes βThat God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
Thomas PaineRead
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.
Thomas PaineRead
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.
Thomas PaineRead
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.
Thomas PaineRead
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
Thomas PaineRead
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Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may.
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Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.
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History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.
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average human βlooks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.
Leonardo Da VinciRead
Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.
Cory BookerRead