I have to sit all day on the telephone (and in my office, lol) listening to idiot after idiot...even in college I would hear the dumbest crap--from professors, students, too many people. I had a professor once tell me that the US can't have a good public transport system, because the country is "too big" and it wouldn't be practical--okay, they could build a transcontenental rail system in the mid-1800's, and we can send space shuttles out to a space station--but we can't have a good network of rail and bus public transport?

In the city where I live, they make stupid excuses as to why they don't put in safe crosswalks, and proper parking for office workers---problems that are totally solvable, and without too, too much fus or bother...but...that's just it. It's a bother. It's too much effort to stop for common sense.

Common sense. It's in short supply in America, these days. I wonder, if Americans in the 1770's, were more like Americans today, would there have even been a revolution?

Thomas Paine wrote a work called, "Common Sense." By today's neo-conservative republican standards, people like Gov. Palin and Rush Limbaugh, would have branded Paine a "Leftist Liberal" and a "Terrorist," I'm quite certain.

In fact, I would bet everything I own (okay, it's an apartment full of used furniture, horsey stuff, books and assorted knick-knacks, but...it's all I got..and I'd be willing to bet it, cos I feel I am correct) anyway, I'd bet all I have--even my old Tom Baker Dr Who poster, my autographed David Tennant post card, my 18th Century Spanish-Colonial horse bit, and my George Hoose painting--(but you cannot have my late mum's favourite knick-knack), that if you quoted some stuff from "Common Sense" to Sarah Palin, not telling her who wrote it or when, only that it was an a citizen of this country, she's call Paine a terrorist.

Paine's political pamphlet brought the rising revolutionary sentiment into sharp focus by placing blame for the suffering of the colonies directly on the reigning British monarch, George III. "Common Sense" sparked such a furor--very similar to the feelings that most Americans had the day after the Pearl Harbor attack in WWII, and 9/11---that a revolution was born.

Some quotes from "Common Sense," published in 1776:

As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.

Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing

OTHER QUOTES BY THOMAS PAINE, FROM HIS OTHER WRITINGS:

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, December 23, 1791

If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute.

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791

MORE QUOTES:

Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.

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

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To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. --Thomas Paine

So that's like, trying to give Sarah Palin brain surgery?