A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
Thomas PaineRead
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Virtue must be cultivated and is not passed down through generations.
Thomas Paine emphasizes the importance of actively promoting virtue rather than assuming it will be inherited. This quote serves as a reminder that the values and qualities of character must be nurtured in each generation through education, experience, and personal responsibility, rather than relying on past advantages or lineage.
Themes
VirtuePosterityCharacterInheritanceValues
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a graduation speech to inspire students about the importance of personal values.
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
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The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another.
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