I have been re-reading and re-savoring the writings of Thomas Paine. Gentle Reader, if you have not invested some time and reflective energy in his writings I invite you to do so. In order to help you consider my invitation I will, today. Offer you some of Thomas Paine’s thoughts. He was a prolific and powerful writer.
As a writer he strove for clarity, clarity, clarity. He possessed a tireless intellectual curiosity. He was happiest when he engaged in long searching conversations. His essay, ‘Common Sense,’ is exceptional for its language, its striking phrases and clean clarity, its sentences as brilliant as fine polished diamonds.
Paine was guided by two powerful influences: The Quaker virtues of sincerity and direct address are wedded to the Enlightenment belief in universal moral principles grounded in ‘Common Sense.’
Paine’s clarity of style enabled ‘Common Sense’s’ arguments accessible to nearly every Colonial reader, empowering them to engage in political debate concerning the daunting challenges they faced. He uses powerfully provocative imagery borrowed from everyday life. He draws not upon Virgil or Seneca but upon a tradesman’s experience or from science or medicine. Images of health or sickness, of youth and old age abound; these images are concrete, vivid and often unnerving.
After reading ‘Common Sense’ the Colonists discovered they could now believe inevitable what only a short time earlier had seemed preposterous – breaking with the Crown and English rule. So, Gentle Reader, without further ado I offer us Thomas Paine’s thoughts – thoughts which are just as challenging today as they were in the late 1700s.
THOMAS PAINE WRITES:
- The more men have to lose, the less willing they are to venture. The rich are in general slaves to fear and submit to power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel.
- Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society.
- Whenever we are planning for posterity we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
- To God, and not to man, are all men accountable on the score of religion.
- Call not the coldness of the soul ‘religion;’ nor put the bigot in the place of the Christian.
- You have mistaken ‘Party’ for ‘Conscience.’ Those who desire to undermine Democracy rooted in compromise and replace it with autocracy rooted in power are hunting after it with an appetite as keen as death.
- Nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice.
- I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stubborn, arrogant, immoral man.
- In the common occurrences of life, we are not only apt to forget the ground we have traveled over, but frequently neglect to gather up experience as we go.
- A too great inattention to past occurrences retards and bewilders our judgment in everything, while, on the contrary, by comparing what is past with what is present, we frequently hit on the true character of both, and become wise with very little trouble.
Searcher-Seeker 