Political Authors From England

"I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo."

"The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact."

"The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided."

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."

"Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked – and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An image became a record of how X had seen Y."

"According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others. By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura."

"What do these conventions mean? What does a nude signify? It is not sufficient to answer these questions merely in terms of the art-form, for it is quite clear that the nude also relates to lived sexuality. To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress."

"Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers - and thus the national economy. It is closely related to certain ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of "The Free World." For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice."

"Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless."

"Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy — less in their deep anatomy — in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike."

"A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but."

"In the first stages of the industrial revolution, animals were used as machines. As also were children. Later, in the so-called post-industrial societies, they are treated as raw material. Animals required for food are processed like manufactured commodities. … This reduction of the animal … is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units. Indeed, during this period an approach to animals often prefigured an approach to man. The mechanical view of the animal’s work capacity was later applied to that of workers. F. W. Taylor who developed the “Taylorism” of timemotion studies and “scientific” management of industry proposed that work must be “so stupid” and so phlegmatic that he (the worker) “more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type.” Nearly all modern techniques of social conditioning were first established with animal experiments. As were also the methods of so-called intelligence testing. Today behaviourists like Skinner imprison the very concept of man within the limits of what they conclude from their artificial tests with animals."

"Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. … That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished. Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied zoo visitor is alone."

"Yet why should an artist's way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality. Not of course our awareness of our potentiality as artists ourselves. But a way of looking at the world implies a certain relationship with the world, and every relationship implies action. The kind of actions implied vary a great deal. ... A work of art can, to some extent, increase an awareness of different potentialities in different people. The important point is that a valid work of art promises in some way or another the possibility of an increase, an improvement. Nor need the word be optimistic to achieve this; indeed, its subject may be tragic. For it is not the subject that makes the promise, it is the artist's way of viewing his subject. Goya's way of looking at a massacre amounts to the contention that we ought to be able to do without massacres."

"I agree with John Berger that peasants don't write novels because they don't need them. They have a portrait of themselves from gossip, tales, music, and some celebrations. That is enough. The middle class at the beginning of the industrial revolution needed a portrait of itself because the old portrait didn't work for this new class. Their roles were different; their lives in the city were new. The novel served this function then, and it still does. It tells about the city values, the urban values. Now my people, we "peasants," have come to the city, that is to say, we live with its values. There is a confrontation between old values of the tribes and new urban values. It's confusing. There has to be a mode to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization."

"(What’s the last great book you read?) ...John Berger’s “Portraits” is among the greatest books on art I’ve ever read. I had a sort of spiritual experience with it."

"We think it also necessary to express our astonishment that a government, desirous of being called , should prefer connection with the most despotic and arbitrary powers in Europe."

"[W]e hold, that the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy, and poverty, is far superior to that of supplying the invented wants of courtly extravagance, ambition and intrigue."

"It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man."

"And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any."

"War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances ... that no human wisdom can calculate the end."

"Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime."

"A man who is so exceedingly civil that for the sake of quietude and a peaceable name will silently see the community imposed upon, or their rights invaded, may, in his principles, be a good man, but cannot be stiled a useful one, neither does he come up to the full mark of his duty; for silence becomes a kind of crime when it operates as a cover or an encouragement to the guilty."

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."

"This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon."

"When I came home from church, for a while, my father insisted on reading aloud to me from Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason-a diatribe against institutional religion."

"For even some American leaders, such ideas were dangerously subversive. Adams, who recognized Paine’s genius but feared his book’s influence, called Paine a “disastrous meteor” whose appearance portended disorder and tumult. Paine wasn’t merely making a case against monarchy and for American independence—he was offering a thrilling vision of America as a refuge for liberty and equality, a laboratory for self-government, independent not just from Britain but from all the existing institutions that kept people in their places. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he announced. “The birthday of a new world is at hand.” This year, the 250th birthday of the nation Paine helped write into existence is at hand. But with a leader who yearns for the powers of a king and an administration working to discount the currency of our most Revolutionary ideals, we seem to be reverting to the old world Paine wished to bury. His pamphlet, a provocation then, is perhaps the provocation we need now. It remains true that “men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent.” It is not theoretical that some figure “laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.” And as freedom is being “hunted around the globe,” we would do well to remember that America was born, in aspiration at least, as a home for the fugitive and “an asylum for mankind.”"

"It did not do so by accident. Paine crafted Common Sense as a kind of talking book; its pages are alive with the voices and scenes of the Revolutionary moment. John Adams complained that Common Sense sounded like it was written by a former inmate of London’s notorious Newgate Prison, “or one who had chiefly associated with such company.” For Paine, this was high praise. He wished for Common Sense to sound like what one might hear in the tavern, the shop, the coffeehouse, or the street. Anticipating public readings, he fashioned the text as something of a script, adding italics and capitals to direct its performers to catch its cadences and hurl its barbs: “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’TIS TIME TO PART.” Paine’s argument for parting was as powerful as his language. His reasoning began with an indictment of the whole institution of monarchy (which he called “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.”) What monarchy’s devotees claimed as natural and divine, Paine described as a crime of history. The first king? He was the “chief among plunderers” and “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.” Such rhetoric announced a marked turn in the discourse on America’s relation to Britain, both in tone and target. Previously, the debate involved the abstract language of political theory and had largely focused on the question of Parliament’s authority over the colonies. Paine’s anti-monarchy appeal at once simplified the case and made it more democratic, shaking the foundations of a world defined by rigid hierarchies."

"Paine was an unlikely spokesman for American independence. When he wrote Common Sense, he’d only recently arrived in America from England. He was 37, and mostly a failure after turns as a staymaker (an artisan who made corsets), teacher, shopkeeper, and tax collector. The two things Paine was best at—talking and writing—had at least landed him in useful company in London, and he’d left for Philadelphia late in 1774 bearing a letter of introduction from no less a patron than Benjamin Franklin. Not long after his arrival, Paine began editing the weekly Pennsylvania Magazine, taking on the horrors of slavery, the unwelcome presence of British troops, the prospects of defensive war, and the trials of marriage (another venture in which he had failed). With Common Sense, Paine, in the words of the American general Charles Lee, “burst upon the world like Jove, in thunder.” First issued on January 10, 1776, it was printed up and down the colonies in some 25 editions over the course of the year. Paine would later claim that it sold 150,000 copies, making it the best-selling “performance” since “the use of letters.” Whatever the figures, if Common Sense didn’t single-handedly convert Americans to independence, it gave words to growing feelings. As a Massachusetts man wrote to Paine, “every sentiment has sunk into my well-prepared heart.”"

"Thomas Paine may have exaggerated when he said his pamphlet Common Sense was the most successful publication “since the invention of printing,” but only by a little. Published 250 years ago last week, Common Sense is perhaps the most consequential piece of political writing in American history. At a moment when hostilities with Britain had already commenced but many still entertained hopes of reconciliation, it made a forceful and seemingly irrefutable argument for independence. As the Atlantic writer Frederick Sheldon wrote in an 1859 portrait of Paine, many Americans “stood shivering on the banks of the Rubicon” at the beginning of 1776. Common Sense helped them cross it. Reading it now, Paine’s words are a kind of portal back to the Revolutionary moment. Although Common Sense is an 18th-century text with 18th-century language and preoccupations, a live current still runs through it. To revisit what Paine captured as a turning point in human history is to be reminded of the most expansive possibilities of the American idea at its creation."

"In 1776, Tom Paine wrote in his rabble-rousing pamphlet Common Sense, "It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow." Well, the distance is closing, and soon enough no one will be safe from the sorrow of ecocide."

"It was the American Revolution's patriot and pamphleteer, Thomas Paine... who launched the social-democratic tradition in the 1790s. In his pamphlets, Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice, Paine outlined plans for combating poverty that would become what we today call Social Security. As Paine put it in the latter work, since God has provided the earth and the land upon it as a collective endowment for humanity, those who have come to possess the land as private property owe the dispossessed an annual rent for it. Specifically, Paine delineated a limited redistribution of income by way of a tax on landed wealth and property. The funds collected were to provide both grants for young people to get started in life and pensions for the elderly."

"Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of life. One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul. He was a victim of the people, but his convictions remained unshaken. He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently waiting for his death. Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their hearts. On the 8th of June, 1809, death came – Death, almost his only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display. In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine."

"As an act of kindness Mr. Woodsworth visited Mr. Paine every day for six weeks before his death. He frequently sat up with him, and did so on the last two nights of his life. He was always there with Dr. Manley, the physician, and assisted in removing Mr. Paine while his bed was prepared. He was present when Dr. Manley asked Mr. Paine "if he wished to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God," and he describes Mr. Paine's answer as animated. He says that lying on his back he used some action and with much emphasis, replied, "I have no wish to believe on that subject." He lived some time after this, but was not known to speak, for he died tranquilly."

"He was emphatic that the Bible was mostly "a history of the grossest vices, and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales" so that, he said, "I cannot dishonour my Creator by calling it by his name". The true word of God, rather, was the nature He had made: "THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD". Paine's view that Christianity was false legitimated his political radicalism, in that to his mind it deprived inegalitarian political arrangements of their buttress. Christianity, in his view, had adapted paganism to the assistance of the great, so that "the Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue". In his view compulsory religion and oppressive states were brethren. It is clear, besides, that proselytizing for deism was important to Paine as an activity in itself. It is easy to see that he conceived a series of artificial hierarchies, mutually supportive and all equally against nature... [H]e viewed Christianity as their intellectual type and political foundation, so that its destruction and supersession by deism were central to his enterprise. About one-quarter of his works was devoted to theology."

"As a man of words and a man of action combined, no other figure of this century could match the way he would take all national frontiers in his stride. He was the first who could properly call himself a citizen of the world, and who sought to translate his claim into action. Amazingly, some of his supposedly less well-educated contemporaries saw all this quite clearly when it was concealed from their terrified rulers. Soon after the publication of The Rights of Man in 1791 one of his Yorkshire disciples wrote: ‘Our views of The Rights of Man are not confined solely to this small island but are extended to the whole human race, black or white, high or low.’ That was the true Paineite doctrine; it was no accident that the American Paine was one of the first to denounce slavery and the English Paine one of the first to describe the lineaments of the welfare state."

"Thomas Paine was the most far-seeing Englishman of the eighteenth century... [H]e remains the major prophet of democracy and representative government... Almost a century before Lincoln he sought to write into the American Constitution a clause against slavery. Long before John Stuart Mill, he championed the rights of women. He was among the very first of English writers to espouse the cause of Indian freedom. Well ahead of my old friends, Dick Crossman or Barbara Castle, he had a good plan for old age pensions. And how men in all our modern parties might tremble at his proposals for land nationalisation; he wanted new laws for marriage and divorce. International arbitration, family allowances, maternity benefits, free education, prison reform, full employment—yes much of the future the Labour Party has offered was previously on offer, in much better English, from Thomas Paine."

"What more, in 1791, could be necessary, to vindicate Burke's Cassandra-like Reflections on the French Revolution, than the publication and ominous popularity of Tom Paine's Rights of Man? Such a book it was, that a generation later Newman's pupils took it as evidence of a singular strength of mind in their tutor that he was known to have read and to possess a copy. He kept it, indeed, under lock and key and let it out only to those who, he was assured, could come to no harm in consequence."

"I consider Paine our greatest political person. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles."

"The neglected pioneer of one revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point of folly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preached republican virtue in better English, nor lived it with a finer disregard of self."

"Thomas Paine has not only been long actuated by, but that he formerly gloried in avowing, an implacable animosity and rooted hatred to this country; and that not merely to its Government, but to its interests, its welfare, its national character, its national honour, its commercial and naval greatness."

"Free trade as a plebeian creed had a long tradition going back to the Levellers and Thomas Paine – who had worked out a sort of pre-Cobdenite philosophy of history based on peace, retrenchment, international free trade, and disarmament."

"He has no country, no affections that constitute the pillars of patriotism."

"I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine."

"Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain."

"You know that the unanimity of the States finally depended on the vote of Joseph Hewes, and was finally determined by him. And yet history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine! Sat verbum sapienti ["a word to the wise is sufficient"]."

"The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."

"Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself—that is my doctrine."

"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside. And while a single nation refuses to lay them down, it is proper that all should keep them up. Horrid mischief would ensue were one-half the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong. The history of every age and nation establishes these truths, and facts need but little arguments when they prove themselves."

"The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind."