Jan 1, 1791
But, after all, what is this metaphor called a crown, or rather what is monarchy?
Thomas Paine
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.
gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1791
When it becomes necessary to do anything, the whole heart and soul should go into the measure, or not attempt it.
Jan 1, 1791
The wisdom of every country, when properly exerted, is sufficient for all its purposes; and there could exist no more real occasion in England to have sent for a Dutch Stadtholder, or a German Elector, than there was in America to have…
Jan 1, 1791
I see in America, a government extending over a country ten times as large as England, and conducted with regularity, for a fortieth part of the expense which Government costs in England.
Jan 1, 1791
If I ask a man in America if he wants a King, he retorts, and asks me if I take him for an idiot?
Jan 1, 1791
That civil government is necessary, all civilized nations will agree; but civil government is republican government.
Jan 1, 1791
Nothing of monarchy appears in any part of it, except in the name which William the Conqueror imposed upon the English, that of obliging them to call him "Their Sovereign Lord the King.
Jan 1, 1791
Besides the endless German intrigues that must follow from a German Elector being King of England, there is a natural impossibility of uniting in the same person the principles of Freedom and the principles of Despotism, or as it is…
Jan 1, 1791
A German Elector is in his electorate a despot; how then could it be expected that he should be attached to principles of liberty in one country, while his interest in another was to be supported by despotism?
Jan 1, 1791
It is the easiest of all the forms of government to be understood and the most eligible in practice; and excludes at once the ignorance and insecurity of the hereditary mode, and the inconvenience of the simple democracy.