a dog-eared town

I guess some of the founding fathers didn’t hold back and were pretty blunt about how they felt on things.

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”

– Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776)

Reference: Thomas Paine: Collected Writings , Foner ed., Library of America (6)

I’m guessing he was a believe in smaller government.