Thomas Paine Quotes

Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches; and tho' avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.

Poverty is curable, but it’s just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

Democracy is impossible in a capitalist system. Capitalism is the realm of injustice and a tyranny of the richest against the poorest.

When the producers of 'Why Poverty?' came to me to do a film about poverty in the United States, I asked if I could do a film about wealth instead. I tend to make films about perpetrators, rather than victims.

Woe to them, that take away the right of the poor.

When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.

We do have a Godly heritage in America, but we have been robbed - robbed by the 3 percent.

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

The poor North has much to do with slavery. It staggers under its load and smarts under its lash.

Property in man, always morally unjust, has become nationally dangerous.

I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.

The origin of all revolutions and corruption, and the spur and source of all base morals are just two sayings: The First Saying: 'So long as I'm full, what is it to me if others die of hunger?' The Second Saying: 'You suffer hardship so that I can live in ease; you work so that I can eat.'

If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

Property is organized robbery.

Redistribution of wealth has rarely been from the rich to the poor. Usually it is from the poor and middle class to the rich.

The most dreaded of all wars, the war of the poor against the rich … will come and come with all its horrors.

A machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of the people, and the debasement of human nature itself as ever proceeded from the ingenuity of man.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.