However strange it may appear to some, or however unwilling they may be to think so, matters not, but many strong and striking reasons may be given, to shew, that nothing can settle our affairs so expeditiously as an open and determined declaration for independence.
Towards the end of the volume, Paine reaches a conclusion about what must be done to settle the impasse which has been reached between the needs of the colonies and the authority of the King. Note that he refers to this idea as potentially strange for some readers. A lot of credit—a LOT of credit—goes to Thomas Jefferson for crafting the foundational document of American independence. Let’s just say that he had a lot of help.
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember, that virtue not hereditary.
It is important to remember—actually, it is kind of essential—that America as an experimental idea was not just a revolution against England, but an insurrection against “the way things are done.” The whole idea was to kick aristocracy to the curb forever and this is a rather amazing thing considering that no one who had been alive for the past thousand years or so in Europe had known anything but aristocratic class and the concept that rights were granted or not granted upon birth. It is not just virtue that Paine is speaking about here; he is taking a potshot against the fundamental way of assigning importance to a person that was still being practiced throughout Europe.
There should be diversity of religious opinions among us: It affords a larger field for Christian kindness.
While unquestionably against basing the legal foundation of American on religion of any sort, Paine does call for religious tolerance. His view is actually the one which is widespread among the founding fathers. Contrary to the arguments of some, the architects of the new country were not eager to create anything even remotely approaching a Christian theocracy. Recognizing the first Europeans immigrants to settle here did so as a consequence of religious intolerance back home, Paine felt it was imperative to establish not just freedom of religion, but freedom from religion.
The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent—of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe.
Paine saw farther into the future than most of those rebelling against England. His cause was not limited to the colonist grievance against the King. Common Sense is a blueprint for a new kind of government never yet seen on the planet and his vision went far beyond one single successful uprising against an empire. Paine is playing a game of dominoes while the rest were playing chess. While those from Jefferson to Franklin to Hancock were laying out a strategy designed strictly for the purpose of announcing checkmate, Paine was looking well past victory over England to a future where all the monarchies of Europe began to fall over as a result of revolutionary inertia.
