Thomas Paine Quotes
When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government
Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man: Part the Second. J. S. Jordan, 1792, p. 117.
There are many who observe that Saudi Arabia has the world’s most efficient oil deposits without which the nation would be poorer than most other Middle Eastern nations. With such huge oil revenues, there is no need of good governance.
This is one of the classic requirements of a just society of the ancient Greeks which capitalism has not yet been able to achieve and is the major weakness cited by critics.
Rights belong to the individual according to Rawls, not to the community of subgroups. Justice demands that the rights of the individual may not be sacrificed for the supposed benefit of the community or entire society. Not all agree with this, but it tends to differentiate Western cultural values from most others in the world where group, community or national benefit
At the time of this quotation, the nation had gone through more than 3 decades of enormous increase in prosperity for the wealthy, and modest gains for the highly skilled, technically trained workers. However, correcting for inflation, average salaries did not increase at all. The middle class was particularly hard hit. Only 20 percent of the population benefitted from the growth at all; however, the 1 percent had rarely prospered more. Kenworthy’s principle did not apply for this period of American history.
Finland at the time also had the characteristics generally associated with the American Dream: Freedom, equality, opportunity, high standard of living, educational opportunity, and social mobility. Milliband’s message was that while the United States was the first country to reach this high standard, there have recently been a few other nations that also provided that wonderful set of experiences and opportunities—specifically some of the Nordic countries where the gap between rich and poor was smaller than the U. S.
Thomas Paine was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights. Historian Saul K. Padover described him as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination".
