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 England this right is said to reside in a metaphor shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling a piece: so are the lions; and it would be a step nearer to reason to say it resided in them, for any inanimate metaphor is no more than a…
If those who vote the supplies are the same persons who receive the supplies when voted, and are to account for the expenditure of those supplies to those who voted them, it is themselves accountable to themselves, and the Comedy of Errors…
Everything in the English government appears to me the reverse of what it ought to be, and of what it is said to be.
Had governments agreed to quarrel on purpose to fleece their countries by taxes, they could not have succeeded better than they have done.
Ah! this government of loaves and fishes has more mischief in it than people have yet reflected on.
May, then, the example of all France contribute to regenerate the freedom which a province of it destroyed!
Conquest and tyranny transplanted themselves with William the Conqueror from Normandy into England, and the country is yet disfigured with the marks.
Certainly they are not, and certain am I, that when the people of England come to reflect upon them they will, like France, annihilate those badges of ancient oppression, those traces of a conquered nation.
A man even of the same town, whose parents were not in circumstances to give him an occupation, is debarred, in many cases, from the natural right of acquiring one, be his genius or industry what it may.
An Englishman is not free of his own country; every one of those places presents a barrier in his way, and tells him he is not a freeman--that he has no rights.
In these chartered monopolies, a man coming from another part of the country is hunted from them as if he were a foreign enemy.
Every chartered town is an aristocratical monopoly in itself, and the qualification of electors proceeds out of those chartered monopolies.