Thomas Paine's Rights of Man Quotes

“What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography

“You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own 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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

“In a time when both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

“To begin with a summary of Paine’s astonishing life and career is to commence with a sense of wonder that he was ever able to emerge at all.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

“It is a deformity in some 'radicals' to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or 'real' one. Many a purge or show trial has got merrily under way in this manner.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography

“Paine and Joel Barlow attempted to change Jefferson’s mind, urging him to settle thrifty German immigrants in the new lands and to permit black families to travel from other states to acquire their own land there, but the sugar interest triumphed,”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

“Society and government may be quite distinct concepts but the study of history makes it very difficult to determine that there ever was a society without a government, let alone vice versa.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

“one of the great failures of human civilization has been its refusal to pay proper attention, or a proper wage, to those who perform the hard but essential primary task of growing our food.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

“all children are born into a losing struggle with death”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

“he none the less argued that ‘an avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty’ because it can accustom a nation ‘to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws’.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

“the tree of liberty must be nurtured by the blood of tyrants, as well as of patriots).”
― Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man