"Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One..." - Quote by Thomas Paine

“Nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice.”

“Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured”

“As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.”

“There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.”

“Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”

“The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.”

“We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.”

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.”

“...I believe that it is not enough, as I said, to tinker at the margins of U.S. immigration law... the United States must institute comprehensive reforms that conform to the realities of the era in which we live.”