Common Sense
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~22,300 words · 106 passages
Cite this work
- APAThomas Paine. (n.d.). Common Sense. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-paine/common-sense
- MLAThomas Paine. "Common Sense." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-paine/common-sense.
- ChicagoThomas Paine. Common Sense. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-paine/common-sense.
What it is about
Common Sense (1776): the pamphlet that made American independence.
Context and history
Fifty pages sold for a shilling that convinced the colonies they wanted separation and not reform. Hundreds of thousands of copies circulated in a population of two and a half million. No other political text has had so direct and so measurable an effect.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
A new edition, with several additions in the body of the work. To which is added an appendix; together with an address to the people called Quakers. Man knows no Master save creating Heaven Or those whom choice and common good ordain. Thomson. PHILADELPHIA Printed and sold by W. & T. Bradford, February 14, 1776. MDCCLXXVI Common Sense By Thomas Paine INTRODUCTION. Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own Right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpation of either. In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious, or unfriendly, will cease of themselves unless t← Back to Thomas Paine