A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
Thomas PaineRead
Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Arms and laws create a sense of order and deter those who would disrupt peace.
This quote by Thomas Paine highlights the importance of both physical strength and legal frameworks in maintaining societal order. Just as laws serve to discourage wrongdoing by instilling fear of consequences, so too do arms provide a means of protection and deterrence against those who would invade or steal. Together, they create a balance that preserves peace and safety within a community.
Themes
ArmsLawsOrderPeaceDeterrence
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on the importance of law enforcement, this quote can illustrate how laws and public safety systems protect society.
More from Thomas Paine
All quotes βThat God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
Thomas PaineRead
I consider the war of America against Britain as the country's war, the public's war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property.
Thomas PaineRead
Had the news of salvation by Jesus Christ been inscribed on the face of the sun and the moon, in characters that all nations would have understood, the whole earth had known it in twenty-four hours, and all nations would have believed it; whereas, though it is now almost two thousand years since, as they tell us, Christ came upon earth, not a twentieth part of the people of the earth know anything of it, and among those who do, the wiser part do not believe it.
Thomas PaineRead
The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
Thomas PaineRead
To reason with goverments, as they have existed for ages, is to argue with brutes. It is only from the nations themselves that reforms can be expected
Thomas PaineRead
Similar quotes
God gave me this illness to remind me that I'm not Number One; He is.
Muhammad AliRead
In the wake of 9/11, we were desperate to bring those responsible for the brutal attacks to justice. But even that urgency did not justify torture. The United States must be held to a higher standard than our enemies, yet some of our actions did not clear that bar.
Dianne FeinsteinRead
Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.
Henry David ThoreauRead
People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.
Wendell BerryRead
All true stories begin and end in a cemetery" - The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz ZafonRead
If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there . . . what then? The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not.
Douglas AdamsRead