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.
So deeply rooted were all the governments of the old world, and so effectually had the tyranny and the antiquity of habit established itself over the mind, that no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa, or Europe, to reform the political…
The revolution of America presented in politics what was only theory in mechanics.
To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not.
On all such subjects men have but to think, and they will neither act wrong nor be misled.
It might be said, that until men think for themselves the whole is prejudice, and not opinion; for that only is opinion which is the result of reason and reflection.
As to the prejudices which men have from education and habit, in favour of any particular form or system of government, those prejudices have yet to stand the test of reason and reflection.
Burke may see I have not written on Government without reflecting on what is Law, as well as on what are Rights.--The only effectual jury in such cases would be a convention of the whole nation fairly elected; for in all such cases the…
Mankind are not now to be told they shall not think, or they shall not read; and publications that go no farther than to investigate principles of government, to invite men to reason and to reflect, and to show the errors and excellences…
If better reasons can be shown for them than against them, they will stand; if the contrary, they will not.
I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe.
It is better that the whole argument should come out than to seek to stifle it.
When those defects, and the means of remedying them, are generally seen by a nation, that nation will reform its government or its constitution in the one case, as the government repealed or reformed the law in the other.