What are facts about Thomas paine?

Question

The guy who wrote Common Sense

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine

You will find what you need here.

Answer 2

5 Facts About Thomas Paine

Answer 3

Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an English and American intellectual, scholar, revolutionary, deist and idealist, who spent much of his time in America and France. A radical pamphleteer, Paine anticipated and helped foment the American Revolution through his powerful writings, most notably Common Sense, an incendiary pamphlet advocating independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. An advocate of liberalism, he outlined his political philosophy in Rights of Man, written both as a reply to Edmund Burke's view of the French Revolution and as a general political philosophy treatise as well as Common Sense, a treatise on the benefits of personal liberty and limited government, in which he considers society a representation of human ideals, and government a necessary evil. Paine was also noteworthy for his support of deism, taking its form in his treatise on religion The Age of Reason, as well as for his eye-witness accounts of both the French and American Revolutions.

(TONS more info on the below sites!!)

Answer 4

He wrote a book.
He isn't related to Paine from the Final Fantasy game.
He's a man.
He died.
He used to be a kid.
He doesn't know how to use a computer.
He can write.
He didn't own a car.
He lived in a house.
He was an American.
He wore tight pants.
He had long hair (not too long).

Answer 5

Hate to do your homework for you, but here you go.
Thomas Paine was born on the twenty-nineth of January 1737 at Thetford, Norfolk in England, as a son of a Quaker. After a short basic education, he started to work, at first for his father, later as an officer of the excise. During this occupation Thomas Paine was an unsuccesfull man, and was twice dismissed from his post. In 1774, he met Benjamin Franklin in London, who advised him to emigrate to America, giving him letters of recommandation.Thomas Paine was born on the twenty-nineth of January 1737 at Thetford, Norfolk in England, as a son of a Quaker. After a short basic education, he started to work, at first for his father, later as an officer of the excise. During this occupation Thomas Paine was an unsuccesfull man, and was twice dismissed from his post. In 1774, he met Benjamin Franklin in London, who advised him to emigrate to America, giving him letters of recommandation. Paine landed at Philadelphia on November 30, 1774. Starting over as a publicist, he first published his African Slavery in America, in the spring of 1775, criticizing slavery in America as being unjust and inhumaine. At this time he also had become co-editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine On arriving in Philadelphia, Paine had sensed the rise of tension, and the spirit of rebellion, that had steadily mounted in the Colonies after the Boston Teaparty and when the fightings had started, in April 1775, with the battles of Lexington and Concord. In Paine's view the Colonies had all the right to revolt against a government that imposed taxes on them but which did not give them the right of representation in the Parliament at Westminster. But he went even further: for him there was no reason for the Colonies to stay dependent on England. On January 10, 1776 Paine formulated his ideas on american independence in his pamphlet Common Sense. In his Common Sense, Paine states that sooner or later independence from England must come, because America had lost touch with the mother country. In his words, all the arguments for separation of England are based on nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments and common sense. Government was necessary evil that could only become safe when it was representative and altered by frequent elections. The function of government in society ought to be only regulating and therefore as simple as possible. Not suprisingly, but nevertheless remarkable was his call for a declaration of independence. Due to the many copies sold (500.000) Paine's influence on the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 is eminent. Another sign of his great influence is the number of loyalist reactions to Common Sense. During the War of Independence Paine volunteered in the Continental Army and started with the writing of his highly influencial sixteen American Crisis papers, which he published between 1776 and 1783. In 1777 he became Secretary of the Committee of Foreign Affairs in Congress, but already in 1779 he was forced to resign because he had disclosed secret information. In the following nine years he worked as a clerck at the Pennsylvania Assembly and published several of his writings. In 1787 Thomas Paine left for England, innitialy to raise funds for the building of a bridge he had designed, but after the outbreak of the French Revolution he became deeply involved in it. Between March 1791 and February 1792 he published numerous editions of his Rights of Man, in which he defended the French Revolution against the attacks by Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. But it was more then a defence of the French Revolution: An analysis of the roots of the discontent in Europe, which he laid in arbitrary government, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and war. The book being banned in England because it opposed to monarchy, Paine failed to be arrested because he was already on his way to France, having been ellected in the National Convention. Though a true republicanist, he was imprisoned in 1793 under Robespierre, because he had voted against the execution of the dethroned king Louis XVI. During his imprisonment the publication of his Age of Reason started. Age of Reason was written in praise of the achievements of the Age of Enlightment, and it was om this book that he was acussed of being an atheist. After his release he stayed in France until 1802, when he sailed back to America, after an invitation by Thomas Jefferson who had met him before when he was minister in Paris and who admirred him. Back in the United States he learned that he was seen as a great infidel, or simply forgotten for what he had done for America. He continued his critical writings, for instance against the Federalists and on religious superstition. After his death in New York City on June 8, 1809 the newspapers read: He had lived long, did some good and much harm, which time judged to be an unworthy epitaph.

Now that wasn't so hard was it?

Answer 6

Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an English and American intellectual, scholar, revolutionary, deist and idealist, who spent much of his time in America and France. A radical pamphleteer, Paine anticipated and helped foment the American Revolution through his powerful writings, most notably Common Sense, an incendiary pamphlet advocating independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. An advocate of liberalism, he outlined his political philosophy in Rights of Man, written both as a reply to Edmund Burke's view of the French Revolution and as a general political philosophy treatise as well as Common Sense, a treatise on the benefits of personal liberty and limited government, in which he considers society a representation of human ideals, and government a necessary evil. Paine was also noteworthy for his support of deism, taking its form in his treatise on religion The Age of Reason, as well as for his eye-witness accounts of both the French and American Revolutions.
Paine was born on 29 January 1737, to impoverished parents: Joseph Paine, a (lapsed) Quaker, and Frances Cocke Paine, an Anglican, in Thetford, Norfolk, eastern England. His sister Elizabeth died at seven months. Paine, who grew up around farmers and uneducated people, left school at the age of 12. He was apprenticed to his father, a corset maker, at 13, apparently failing at this as well. At 19, Paine became a merchant seaman, serving a short time before returning to England in April 1759. There he set up a corset shop in Sandwich, Kent. In September of that year, Paine married Mary Lambert. His business collapsed soon after. His wife became pregnant, and, following a move to Margate, Mary went into early labour. Neither his wife nor their child survived.

In July 1761, Paine returned to Thetford where he worked as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762, he became an excise officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire. In August 1764, he was again transferred, this time to Alford, where his salary was £50 a year. On 27 August 1765, Paine was discharged from his post for claiming to have inspected goods when in fact he had only seen the documentation. On 3 July 1766, he wrote a letter to the Board of Excise asking to be reinstated. The next day the board granted his request to be filled, upon vacancy. While waiting for an opening, Paine worked as a staymaker in Diss, Norfolk and later as a servant (records show he worked for a Mr. Noble of Goodman's Fields and then for a Mr. Gardiner at Kensington). He also applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England and, according to some accounts, he preached in Moorfields.

On 15 May 1767, Paine was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall. He was subsequently asked to leave this post to await another vacancy and he became a schoolteacher in London. On 19 February 1768, Paine was appointed to Lewes, East Sussex. He moved into the room above the 15th-century Bull House, a building which held the snuff and tobacco shop of Samuel and Esther Ollive. Here Paine became involved for the first time in civic matters when Samuel Ollive introduced him into the Society of Twelve, a local elite group that met twice a year to discuss town issues. In addition, Paine participated in the Vestry, the influential church group that collected taxes and tithes and distributed them to the poor. On 26 March 1771, at age 36, he married his landlord's daughter, Elizabeth Ollive.

Paine lobbied Parliament for better pay and working conditions for excisemen, and in 1772 he published The Case of the Officers of Excise, a 21-page article and his first political work. In September 1774, Paine met Benjamin Franklin in London. Franklin advised Paine to emigrate to the British colonies in America, and wrote him letters of recommendation. Paine left England in October, arriving in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 30. Just before he left, Paine and his second wife (with whom he did not get along) were legally separated.

Paine barely survived the transatlantic voyage. The drinking water on the ship was so bad that typhoid fever killed five passengers, and Paine was too ill to leave his cabin when he arrived in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin's physician, who had arrived to welcome him to America, literally had to pick up Paine and carry him off. It took the doctor six weeks to nurse Paine back to health.

Paine was also an inventor, receiving a patent in Europe for the single-span iron bridge. He developed a smokeless candle[1][2], and worked with John Fitch on the early development of steam engines. This aptitude for invention, coupled with his originality of thought, found him an advocate more than a century later in Edison who championed Paine and helped rescue him from his relative obscurity.

Some believe Paine may have begun to form his early views on natural justice while listening to the Puritan mob jeering and attacking those punished in the stocks. Others have argued that he was influenced by his Quaker father. In The Age of Reason – Paine's treatise in support of deism – he wrote:

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers ? though I revere their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at [their] conceit; ? if the taste of a Quaker [had] been consulted at the Creation, what a silent and drab-colored Creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.

Paine advocated a liberal world view, considered radical in his day. He dismissed monarchy, and viewed all government as, at best, a necessary evil. He opposed slavery and was amongst the earliest proponents of social security, universal free public education, a guaranteed minimum income, and many other radical ideas now common practice in most western democracies.

With regard to his religious views, in The Age of Reason (begun in France in 1793), Paine stated:I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
He described himself as a "Deist" and commented:

How different is [Christianity] to the pure and simple profession of Deism! The true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical.
Paine published an early anti-slavery tract [3] and was co-editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. [4], [5]

Common Sense, published 1776Common Sense, Paine's pro-independence monograph published anonymously on 10 January 1776 spread quickly among literate colonists. About 120,000 copies are alleged to have been distributed throughout the colonies which themselves totaled only a few million free inhabitants, making it the best-selling work in 18th-century America. It convinced many colonists, including George Washington, to seek redress in political independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and argued strongly against any compromise short of independence. The work was greatly influenced (including in its name – Paine had originally proposed the title Plain Truth) by the equally controversial pro-independence writer Benjamin Rush and was instrumental in bringing about the Declaration of Independence.

Paine's strength lay in his ability to present complex ideas in clear and concise form, as opposed to the more philosophical approaches of his Enlightenment contemporaries in Europe, and it was Paine who proposed the name United States of America for the new nation. When the war arrived, Paine published a series of important pamphlets, The Crisis, credited with inspiring the early colonists during the ordeals faced in their long struggle with the British. The first Crisis paper, published on 23 December 1776, began with the famous words:

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Washington himself found it so uplifting that he ordered it to be read to all his troops on 25 December 1776, prior to Washington's crossing of the Delaware.

In 1778, Paine alluded to the then ongoing secret negotiations with France in his pamphlets, and there was a scandal which resulted in Paine being dropped from the Committee on Foreign Affairs. In 1781, however, he accompanied John Laurens during his mission to France. His services were eventually recognized by the state of New York by the granting of an estate at New Rochelle, and he received considerable gifts of money from both Pennsylvania and – at Washington's suggestion – from Congress.