Status Updates From Common Sense

“It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of present sorrow. The evil is not sufficiently brought to their doors to make them feel the precariousness with which all American properties possessed… [Let Boston] instruct us forever to renounce a power in whom we can have no trust.”

“How came the king by a power which the people are afraid to trust, and always obliged to check? Such a power cannot be the gift of a wise people, neither can power which needs checking be from God.”

“Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices… When we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in the country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnished the means by which we suffer.”