"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."
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Activists from the United StatesEssayists from EnglandPolitical activistsActivists from EnglandPolitical authors from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
Michael Foot, ‘Citizen Paine’, The Guardian (16 November 1989), quoted in The Uncollected Michael Foot: Essays Old and New, ed. Brian Brivati (2003), pp. 286–287
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine
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Thomas Paine
1737 – 1809
britisch-US-amerikanischer [[Politiker]]
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