U.S. Law

All the usurpation, and tyranny, and extortion, and robbery, and fraud, that are involved in the monopoly of money are practised, and attempted to be justified, under the pretence of maintaining the standard of value. This pretence is intrinsically a false one throughout.

The Laws of England may aptly enough be divided into two Kinds, viz. Lex Scripta, the written Law: and Lex non Scripta, the unwritten Law: For although (as shall be shewn hereafter) all the Laws of this Kingdom have some Monuments or Memorials thereof in Writing, yet all of them have not their Original in Writing; for some of those Laws have obtain'd their Force by immemorial Usage or Custom, and such Laws are properly call'd Leges non Scriptae, or unwritten Laws or Customs.

I have few heroes. My first was Clarence Darrow. When I was a child, my father proudly showed me a small paperback volume entitled "Resist Not Evil," a broadside against capital punishment written by Darrow in the early part of the century. The volume had been autographed by Darrow to his mother, and by her to my father. It formed the core of my credo and although it disappeared many years ago and I have moved several times, I still cannot open a box of books, or look at the shelves in my mother

In what does man's pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole; in Reason.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

The revolution of America presented in politics what was only theory in mechanics. So deeply rooted were all the governments of the old world, and so effectually had the tyranny and the antiquity of habit established itself over the mind, that no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa, or Europe, to reform the political condition of man. Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.

The Age of Reason is a philosophical treatise written by the 18th Century American philosopher and patriot Thomas Paine, best remembered as the author of the political pamphlet Common Sense, credited with exciting colonial opinion in support of the American Revolutionary War.