“I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Thomas Paine, the spitfire son of an English grocer, wrote in Common Sense, in 1776. Kings have no right to reign, Paine argued, because, if we could trace hereditary monarchy back to its beginnings – “could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise” – we’d find “the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.”

“I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Thomas Paine, the spitfire son of an English grocer, wrote in Common Sense, in 1776. Kings have no right to reign, Paine argued, because, if we could trace hereditary monarchy back to its beginnings – “could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise” – we’d find “the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.”

— Jill Lepore