Thomas Paine Quotes

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

Other sins find their vent in the accomplishment of evil deeds, whereas pride lies in wait for good deeds, to destroy them.

[F]alsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

Hatred is one of the poisons; like jaundice, it alters the true colors of things.

All looks yellow to a jaundiced eye.

Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul. . . And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?

When the thinking of a people becomes corrupt, the pure silver becomes impure in its hands.

Intemperance is a hydra with a hundred heads. She never stalks abroad unaccompanied with impurity, anger, and the most infamous profligacies.

Time indeed changes manners and notions, and so far we must expect institutions to bend to them. But time produces also corruption of principles, and against this it is the duty of good citizens to be ever on the watch, and if the gangrene is to prevail at last, let the day be kept off as long as possible.

Lying eats into the soul. If it becomes a habit it frays the edge of your spirit. Truth telling, although sometimes harder to do, strengthens your heart. It serves a person ill not to tell the truth.

It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it.

The verdicts today should send the message that within the police department there is no greater betrayal of the badge and of the brotherhood than to ensnare another officer in a web of lies and deceit.

Rome has betrayed itself. It knew the truth and chose violence, it knew humaneness and it chose tyranny.

Greed is at the bottom of most of the wrong-doing with which government has to deal.

Fattened in vice, so callous and so gross, he sins and sees not, senseless of his loss.

The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

I met too frankly preposterous, if it weren't for their banal evil, politicians and pastors who told knowing lies about the evils of homosexuality in order to attract bigger flocks to their churches and more votes and power to their corrupt councils. LGBT people seem to be being scapegoated more and more just as at the same time in more enlightened countries more and more freedom to express themselves, marry, be given official intersex status and so on is offered.

What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate government administration and media are on the level with us this time. Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. This is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one's ribs get re-broken again.

Our prejudices - we all have them - are part of our personality structure. The problem is that our prejudices may lie lurking at the bottom of the subterranean mind where the slowly ooze up and color our thinking without our knowing it.

Selfishness is the root of great evil.

When one feels no shame in telling a deliberate lie, there is no evil, I tell you, he will not do.

It induced us to conduct government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality.

To put more faith in lies and hate than truth and love, is the true atheism.

Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much.