Thomas Paine Quotes
... in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. R. Bell, 1776.
Three Chicago Aldermen had marched on an art school demanding that a painting they found offensive be removed from public display. The police seized the painting, prompting a lawsuit.
This is the most formalized and sophisticated compendium of laws of the so-called “barbaric peoples” of Europe. The compilation was in many ways a documentation of the traditional laws of the Visigoths that had evolved over hundreds of years.
Thomas Paine was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights. Historian Saul K. Padover described him as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination".
