R.S. Thomas Quotes

Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.

Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it.

Lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind.

... a thirst for power is the natural disease of monarchy.

If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent.

It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all.

...the true greatness of a nation is founded on principles of humanity.

The more we bestow the richer we become.

A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.

Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.

The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly.

Wisdom is not the purchase of a day

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself.

Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles; he can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.

Better fare hard with good men than feast it with bad.

Let the world see that this nation can bear prosperity; and that her honest virtue in time of peace is equal to her bravest valor in time of war.

Man did not make the earth, and though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity, any part of it.

The more men have to lose, the less willing are they to venture.

Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins and you will have sins in abundance.

Aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice.

The intimacy which is contracted in infancy, and friendship which is formed in misfortune, are, of all others, the most lasting and unalterable.

We feel something like respect for consistency even in error. We lament the virtue that is debauched into a vice; but the vice that affects a virtue becomes the more detestable.

The representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom where it can be found.

It is a general idea, that when taxes are once laid on, they are never taken off.

Nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice.

We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest truest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Is it because you are sunk in the cruelty of superstition, or feel no interest in the honor of your Creator, that you listen to the horrid tales of the Bible, or hear them with callous indifference?

It is a faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object.

The moral duty of man consists of imitatingthe moral goodness and beneficence of God,manifested in the creation, toward all His creatures.

In the progress of politics, as in the common occurrences of life, we are not only apt to forget the ground we have travelled over, but frequently neglect to gather up experiences as we go.

Aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species.

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

The greatest characters the world has known, have rose on the democratic floor. Aristocracy has not been able to keep a proportionate pace with democracy.

A man will pass better through the world with a thousand open errors upon his back than in being detected in one sly falsehood. When one is detected, a thousand are suspected.

When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order.

The people of America are a people of property; almost every man is a freeholder.

For the fate of Charles the first, hath only made kings more subtle — not more just.

If there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.

To possess ourselves of a clear idea of what government is, or ought to be, we must trace it to its origin.

To live with our enemies as if they may some time become our friends, and to live with our friends as if they may some time become our enemies, is not a moral but a political maxim

It may perhaps be said that it signifies nothing to a man what is done to him after he is dead; but it signifies much to the living; it either tortures their feelings or hardens their hearts.

They may be all comprehended under three heads - 1st, Superstition; 2d, Power; 3d, the common interests of society, and the common rights of man.

Thus commerce, though in itself a moral nullity, has had a considerable influence in tempering the human mind....he trades with the same countries ...(that he) would have gone to war with.

A government of our own is our natural right

It is unpleasant to see character throw itself away.

It is from the power of taxation being in the hands of those who can throw so great a part of it from their own shoulders, that it has raged without a check.

"Government," says Swift, "is a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads."

Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches; and tho' avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.

I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.

When authors and critics talk of the sublime, they see not how nearly it borders on the ridiculous.