Thomas Paine's “Common Sense” Turns 248 Years Old

Last Updated on January 10, 2024

American Founding Father Thomas Paine published his landmark manifesto Common Sense 248 years ago on January 10, 1776. Paine’s razor-sharp writing made him a galvanizing force behind the American Revolution.

Thomas Paine led an extremely interesting life. A magazine editor with a gift for words, Paine was a down-on-his-luck chap until he met Benjamin Franklin in London and he went to America where he worked on Philadelphia Magazine and railed against slavery.

British-born Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” booklet was 50 pages long and it made him a literary rock star with more than half a million sales, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Paine even penned the “These are the times that try men’s souls” line that George Washington read to the men at Valley Forge — which was much more inspirational than Creepy Joe Biden’s recent disturbing “I understand power” moment at Valley Forge on the campaign trail.

America ended up freeing the land from the British. Paine simply couldn’t help himself from being a perpetually broke rabble-rouser, and he ended up moving to France and becoming a leading voice in the French Revolution that overthrew the monarchy. But he inevitably ticked off the French rebels even though they were on the same side, because Thomas Paine did not want to kill ousted monarch King Louis the Sixteenth, so hardliners threw Paine in prison for a while. Paine remained active in French politics and wrote The Age of Reason.

Now, 248 years later, sadly, America is occupied again today by the colonizing force of bankster globalism and the worldwide war machine.

Here are some excerpts from a book that liberated a people:

“Why should we think that some people are born to be rulers and some born to be subjects? “[T]here is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of Heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.”…

“Passing down power from father to son is a bad idea; no reason to think that royal children will make good rulers. To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho’ himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion.”…

“We have an opportunity to remake America and make it an example of freedom for the world; we should seize it. I shall conclude these remarks, with the following timely and well-intended hints. We ought to reflect, that there are three different ways by which an independancy may hereafter be effected; and that one of those three, will, one day or other, be the fate of America, viz. By the legal voice of the people in Congress; by a military power; or by a mob: It may not always happen that our soldiers are citizens, and the multitude a body of reasonable men; virtue, as I have already remarked, is not hereditary, neither is it perpetual. Should an independancy be brought about by the first of those means, we have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months. The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”