"We have it in our power to begin the world over again"
About this Quote
The audacity of Paine's line is the point: it doesn’t ask permission from history, it fires history. “We have it in our power” yanks agency away from kings, churches, and the polite fatalism of inherited order. It’s an incantation of collective authorship, written in the heat of revolution when “power” wasn’t a metaphor but a wager with prisons, gallows, and war.
Paine is doing several things at once. First, he flatters the reader just enough to recruit them. The “we” is elastic, inviting ordinary colonists into a grand project usually reserved for elites. Second, he reframes rebellion as creation. Starting “the world over again” isn’t mere regime change; it’s the moral upgrade of the political operating system. The phrase smuggles in Enlightenment confidence: society can be designed, not merely endured.
The subtext is a rebuke to nostalgia. Monarchists defend themselves by calling tradition stability; Paine calls it rot. By implying the world can be restarted, he treats the old world as something already broken beyond repair. That’s why the line lands like a clean sentence in a messy moment: it simplifies complexity into a single, usable permission slip.
Context matters. In Common Sense and the broader revolutionary pamphlet culture, Paine wasn’t writing for salons. He was writing for a public newly aware of itself, one that needed not policy minutiae but a storyline strong enough to outcompete fear. The genius is how the sentence turns uncertainty into possibility, making radical change feel not only necessary, but achievable.
Paine is doing several things at once. First, he flatters the reader just enough to recruit them. The “we” is elastic, inviting ordinary colonists into a grand project usually reserved for elites. Second, he reframes rebellion as creation. Starting “the world over again” isn’t mere regime change; it’s the moral upgrade of the political operating system. The phrase smuggles in Enlightenment confidence: society can be designed, not merely endured.
The subtext is a rebuke to nostalgia. Monarchists defend themselves by calling tradition stability; Paine calls it rot. By implying the world can be restarted, he treats the old world as something already broken beyond repair. That’s why the line lands like a clean sentence in a messy moment: it simplifies complexity into a single, usable permission slip.
Context matters. In Common Sense and the broader revolutionary pamphlet culture, Paine wasn’t writing for salons. He was writing for a public newly aware of itself, one that needed not policy minutiae but a storyline strong enough to outcompete fear. The genius is how the sentence turns uncertainty into possibility, making radical change feel not only necessary, but achievable.
Quote Details
| Topic | New Beginnings |
|---|---|
| Source | Common Sense — Thomas Paine (1776). Famous closing line: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." (concluding paragraph of the pamphlet). |
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