The object of revolutions
Thomas Paine
"Revolutions have for their object, a change in the moral condition of governments." Thomas Paine - Rights of Man II, 1792.
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© 2025 Kenneth Burchell
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True that. Yet contemporary Revolution might be ascribed to a change in the immoral condition of government.
Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson must have been on the same page at the extreme. The controversial quote by Jefferson in a letter to William Stephen Smith concerning Shay's uprising Jefferson said, "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants".