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Who really said it

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right

Written by Thomas Paine 1737–1809 · English-born American political philosopher & pamphleteer
Verified Free to reuse

This is a genuine Paine line. It appears in the Introduction to Common Sense (first published 10 January 1776), and the popular wording matches the pamphlet verbatim: “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” Confirmed against the full text.

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right” Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), Introduction

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Work
Common Sense
Section
Introduction
First published
10 January 1776, Philadelphia
Author
Thomas Paine (1737–1809)

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides.

The famous line opens the pamphlet’s Introduction, where Paine warns that custom is often mistaken for correctness.

Read the Introduction to Common Sense (full text)

How we verified it

Public domain

Common Sense was first published in January 1776 — well before the 1931 U.S. copyright threshold — so the text, including this sentence, is in the public domain.

Fact-check

Is it really Paine?

Thomas Paine is a magnet for invented quotations, so skepticism is the right default. This one, however, is authentic — the caution is about wording, not authorship.

Common paraphrase Slight misquote

The line is sometimes rendered as “a long habit of not thinking a thing is wrong” or with modernized punctuation. Paine’s original reads “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right” — verified in the Introduction to Common Sense.

Sourceless sharing

The quote circulates widely on quote sites and social media with no citation, which fuels doubt. In this case the source is real and specific: the opening pages of Common Sense.

Genuine Paine: the sentence appears verbatim in the Introduction to Common Sense (1776).

Context

Why it mattered

Paine placed this line at the very start of Common Sense to disarm readers before making his radical argument for independence. He anticipates that his ideas will meet resistance — not because they are wrong, but because monarchy and colonial loyalty had become customary and therefore felt right.

The sentence has since become a general-purpose aphorism about how habit launders bad ideas into respectable ones, quoted far beyond its revolutionary origins.

Time makes more converts than reason.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Doubt Truth Wisdom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Common Sense — Introduction (full text)ushistory.org

Primary text of the Introduction, containing the quote verbatim.
Common Sensethomaspaine.org

Thomas Paine National Historical Association's edition of the pamphlet.
Common Sense (e-text)gutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg's free full text of Common Sense.
Common Sense — 1776 pamphletoll.libertyfund.org

Online Library of Liberty scholarly presentation of the pamphlet.
Thomas Paineen.wikiquote.org

Sourced Paine quotations, including lines from Common Sense.

The true author

About Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

1737–1809 · English-born American political philosopher & pamphleteer

Thomas Paine was a radical pamphleteer whose plain, forceful prose helped ignite the American Revolution. Common Sense (1776) sold in the hundreds of thousands and made the case for independence to ordinary colonists; he followed it with The American Crisis, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. He is one of the internet’s most fabricated-for names — which makes a genuinely sourced line like this one worth flagging.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Thomas Paine, “Introduction,” in Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776).

MLA (9th ed.)

Paine, Thomas. “Introduction.” Common Sense, Philadelphia, 1776.

APA (7th ed.)

Paine, T. (1776). Common sense. Philadelphia.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-long-habit-of-not-thinking-a-thing-wrong-gives-it-a

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