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thomas paine
Published 250 Years Ago Today, Thomas Paine's Common Sense Must Inspire Us Again
With a document that speaks powerfully to our current crisis, Paine emboldened his fellow citizens-to-be to turn their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolutionary war for independence and inspired them to establish a democratic republic.
Jan 10, 2026
Common Sense by Thomas Paine is the most influential work of political literature in American history.
Self-published on January 10, 1776, Common Sense instantly became a sensation, spreading like wildfire across the colonies. Within a few weeks, it had sold more copies than any book in the history of the colonies.
Paine’s arguments persuaded thousands-upon-thousands of people throughout the 13 colonies to demand more than reform, to support complete independence from England and join the revolutionary cause.
Less than six months after Common Sense was first published in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence was signed in the same city, establishing a new country defined, in contrast to its European predecessors, by its commitment to equality, liberty and the consent of the governed—just as Paine advocated in Common Sense (and, unlike the founding fathers, Paine did not hesitate to advocate for democracy).
Paine showed Americans... that they could govern themselves without kings and overlords, and that they could set an example to the world of what a nation of citizens, not subjects, could accomplish. The relevance of these passages for our troubled times cannot be overstated.
Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia from England in late 1774. Paine quickly fell in love with America and its people. Struck by the country’s startling contradictions, magnificent possibilities, and wonderful energies, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he committed himself to the American cause. In the Spring of 1775, he called for the abolition of slavery, a position he saw as consistent with—and central to—the rebellion.
Paine published Common Sense on January 10, 1776, a pamphlet of fewer than 50 pages, that changed the course of world history. In its pages, he harnessed Americans’ shared but as-of-yet unstated thoughts, expressing them in words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth” and “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine emboldened his fellow citizens-to-be to turn their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolutionary war for independence, and inspired them to establish a democratic republic. Paine defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.
In Common Sense, Paine showed Americans that they were in fact Americans, not British colonists, that they could govern themselves without kings and overlords, and that they could set an example to the world of what a nation of citizens, not subjects, could accomplish. The relevance of these passages for our troubled times cannot be overstated.
Paine appreciated the ethnic and religious diversity that already prevailed and projected the nation-to-be as a refuge for those seeking freedom. (Indeed, many passages in Common Sense speak directly to the crises enveloping America today.)
Crucially, Paine portrayed America not as thirteen separate entities, but as a singular nation-state: “Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honour… Our strength is continental not provincial.” And he proposed a charter—a constitution encompassing a Bill of Rights—both to bind the prospective states into a union and to guarantee that liberty, equality, and democracy would prevail. Most emphatically, he argued for “freedom of conscience” and, to assure it, the separation of Church and State: “As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith….”
In the spring of that year, 120,000 copies of Common Sense were sold. 500,000 by the end of the Revolutionary War. (Throughout Paine took no royalties, using the funds to buy mittens for General Washington’s troops). Plus, newspapers throughout the colonies excerpted it and working people read it aloud in taverns, cafes, and farm fields. Soon, town councils north and south were petitioning the Second Continental Congress to declare INDEPENDENCE! America turned Paine into a radical, and he turned Americans into democratic revolutionaries.
Today, we honor Common Sense on the 250th Anniversary of its publication, and we honor its author, Tom Paine, one of the authors of our country
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Climbing the Mountain of My Emerging Life
Life isn’t preset. It’s an endless flow of God-knows-what, and it’s up to me—it’s up to all of us—to assign meaning, as best we can, to what’s going on.
Dec 29, 2024
Dig, ponder, dig some more.
A year ago I wrote a column about some of the early moments of my growing up—not just memories but profound moments of awareness; flickers, you might say, of becoming who I am. I was 77 at the time. Now I’m... oh yeah, 78. Can you believe it? Another year is almost over. Holiday season shimmers, the smell of pine is in the air. It’s Christmas: a perfect time to open, once again, the stocking known as memory.
In last year’s column, I wrote about three childhood moments that created me as a person—or informed me that I had changed, moved forward in the process of becoming. These were moments of self-awareness. Gosh! I had no idea such a thing existed, but there I was at age six, playing “Red Rover” on my elementary-school playground with a bunch of other kids and I realized: I was part of something bigger than myself; I wasn’t alone. Run and play, laugh and love! It’s called “community” (I later learned).
The interesting part, for me, as I write about it six-plus decades later, is to be able to feel the moment of becoming—to feel it as a new chunk of being, given to me almost as a Christmas present.
A second moment of becoming: I was 10 and had gotten into a fight after school—with a good pal. Huh? I rode my bike home, parked in the alley behind my house, and stood there rubbing my bruised elbow, aswirl in confusion. Fighting is so stupid! I decided I would never fight again—or rather, knew I would never fight again. I knew I had changed.
The third moment I wrote about was when I was 13. I had just seen a strange, disturbing movie with my mother and sister called Imitation of Life. We had car trouble on the way home and as we waited for the repair work to be finished, a puzzling awareness hit me, totally out of the blue. “I’m a genius,” I told myself—not with a smirk that I’m smarter than you are, but just the opposite. I was overwhelmed. Life isn’t preset. It’s an endless flow of God-knows-what, and it’s up to me—it’s up to all of us—to assign meaning, as best we can, to what’s going on. We’re all creating the future, moment by moment, whether we know it or not.
Yikes. This was far more responsibility than I was comfortable with, but I was stuck with it. I pushed on with growing up. These were all private moments, quietly “me” in a way that was no one else’s business. But some inner balloon (pardon the childish metaphor) was getting ready to burst. I had lousy penmanship, but I was turning into a writer, even though I hardly knew it. In fact, I got a “D” in English in eighth grade because I just couldn’t grasp the rules of grammar that were dumped on us out of the bag of marbles called education. What the heck is a participle? What’s an indirect object?
Attention, grade fanatics: We all learn at our own speed and in our own way. Two years later, in 10th grade, one of the books we were assigned to read was The Diary of Anne Frank. Birth of a writer! Well, sort of. I was riveted by her words, by the details of her life she bequeathed the world—and I felt a deep compulsion to start my own journal.
It literally took a year of trying. I’d buy a 39-cent notebook and start putting pieces of my life into words, usually prefaced with the warning: “Private. Do not read!” I felt compelled to pump up the importance of what I was saying, to write from the perspective that my life was significant. And the journal would never last more than a day or two. I could feel the phoniness in my words and would stash the notebook on a shelf, to be forgotten. But I kept trying! Something in me was determined to make this process work—solely for myself, of course. Turns out that may be the hardest audience of all to win over.
And then—I’m 16 at this point, in 11th grade—something happened: I was certain, I was terrified, that I had failed a solid geometry test one day. When I got home, I opened a notebook and scribbled the words: “God, I am worried. Scared to death is more like it.”
And the words simply flowed. I couldn’t stop. I went on for four pages, writing about the test, writing about how lousy I was doing in my English class, and then... yee-haw! I started writing about my “barren social life”: about the all the parties I hadn’t been invited to and my fear that I was a lousy dancer. I wasn’t “trying” to say anything; I was just letting it all out, spewing my feelings with unchecked honesty.
Two days later I wrote a second entry. Turns out I actually did OK on the math test, much to my amazement. And I was feeling good. I wrote about driving to a Junior Achievement meeting with some friends and singing a bunch of inappropriate songs on the way home. I even inserted the lyrics into the notebook. Something was happening: I wasn’t trying to churn out “good writing.” I was simply writing—giving words to my emotions and bringing them to life. I was finding, as I put it many years later, my voice.
And yeah, this is what growing up is all about. There’s nothing special or unique about any of this—it’s just a smattering of specificity. The interesting part, for me, as I write about it six-plus decades later, is to be able to feel the moment of becoming—to feel it as a new chunk of being, given to me almost as a Christmas present, not by Santa but by Anne Frank... and so many others: my parents, of course. My friends. My teachers.
Indeed, I must take a moment to honor Mom and Dad. They gave me life, home, family—and something more: the permission, you might say, to go my own direction. This was not easy for them, especially for my mother, who was a devout Lutheran, who had to watch her son break from the church and head off in his own spiritual direction.
Among the books I read in high school, three of them had a serious impact on my becoming: The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Their words were rocks for me to grab as I climbed the mountain of my emerging life. At one point, as I was writing in my journal, I made the declaration that I was a non-conformist. And one of the final tasks I had to fulfill before I graduated was to write my senior paper: a big-deal assignment. The topic could be of my choosing, but I had to quote a number of recognized authors. I chose the above trio. The paper was called “Is a Man’s Mind His Own?”
Yes, I wrote, it is.
I had sort of known this all along, though without necessarily even wanting it to be the case, except, as a boy, having the right to misbehave. But this was a serious step beyond boyhood. It was my first real step into the public domain. Uh oh. Now what?
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No Time to Hide: We Need You!
We offer this comic-strip recalling the revolutionary promise proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Do not underestimate the power of that promise.
Nov 27, 2024
Yes. We lost. And yes, as Thomas Paine pronounced in late 1776 in The Crisis, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Nonetheless, as we argue here, this is not a time to despair and hide away. For as Paine went on to write in that pamphlet: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” Words that encouraged Americans to sustain the Revolution and, yes, go on to win battles and ultimately, victory.
We offer this comic-strip recalling the revolutionary promise proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—and regularly reaffirmed by our greatest leaders—to remind us all that we, native-born and newly-arrived alike, are the children and grandchildren of generations of progressives and radicals who, in the course of almost 250 years, made that promise their own and fought to realize it.
Do not underestimate the power of that promise. And surely, you feel it too.
Consider the testimony of the great self-emancipated black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in his speech in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Douglass lambasted the country and his fellow Americans: “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” And yet, in the end, even he did not surrender to despair: “Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery... I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”
So, yes, we lost. But the struggle continues. And in that spirit, we want you to know that when Martin Luther King, Jr. would find himself growing despondent about the state of America and the forces opposing the civil rights struggle, he would recall Thomas Paine’s revolutionary words from Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
In the weeks and months ahead, we plan to create a continuing series of comics reminding us of who we are and what that demands—and, hopefully, encouraging us all to pursue progressive and radical-democratic action.
This is not a time to seek a solitary life, but to act in solidarity.
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