The Public Record
Thomas Paine was an English-born American Founding Father, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman. His pamphlets Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783) framed the Patriot argument for independence from Great Britain at the outset of the American Revolution. Paine advanced Enlightenment-era arguments for human rights that shaped revolutionary discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.
In contemplating revolutions, it is easy to perceive that they may arise from two distinct causes; the one, to avoid or get rid of some great calamity; the other, to obtain some great and positive good; and the two may be distinguished by…
But where genuine principles of liberty pervade a people, every thing is restored to order; and the soldier civilly treated, returns the civility.
As soldiers have hitherto been treated in most countries, they might be said to be without a friend.
It would be better that nations should wi continue the pay of their soldiers during their lives, and give them their discharge and restore them to freedom and their friends, and cease recruiting, than retain such multitudes at the same…
The oppressed soldier will become a freeman; and the tortured sailor, no longer dragged through the streets like a felon, will pursue his mercantile voyage in safety.
When all the governments of Europe shall be established on the representative system, nations will become acquainted, and the animosities and prejudices fomented by the intrigue and artifice of courts, will cease.
The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.
The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole, are beginning to think.
When another nation shall join France, despotism and bad government will scarcely dare to appear.
By the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by the latter, in Europe.
Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all Europe, as is produced by the two Revolutions of America and France.
It serves to keep up deceitful expectations which prevent people from looking into the defects and abuses of government.