Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.

I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours - and thrived on it.

Every failure is a lesson learned about your strategy.

I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.

Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.

The endeavor to change universal power by selfish supplication I do not believe in.