Thomas Paine

If a country does not understand its own affairs, how is a foreigner to understand them, who knows neither its laws, its manners, nor its language?

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.

If I ask a man in America if he wants a King, he retorts, and asks me if I take him for an idiot?

I see in America the generality of people living in a style of plenty unknown in monarchical countries; and I see that the principle of its government, which is that of the equal Rights of Man, is making a rapid progress in the world.

If monarchy is a useless thing, why is it kept up anywhere? and if a necessary thing, how can it be dispensed with?

That civil government is necessary, all civilized nations will agree; but civil government is republican government.

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.

Considering that all the internal government is executed by the people, the taxes of England ought to be the lightest of any nation in Europe; instead of which, they are the contrary.

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…

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?

The case was not, which they liked best, but which they hated most; and the least hated passed for love.

Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured.