Rights of Man

Edmund Burke had mourned the fallen splendour of the French court, and Thomas Paine, a Norfolk staymaker who had already helped argue one nation into being, answered that he pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird. The whole book unfolds from that line: rights are not granted by charters and cannot be signed away by ancestors, the dead hold no authority over the living, and governing beyond the grave is the most insolent tyranny there is.