Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was a radical pamphleteer whose plain, forceful prose helped ignite the American Revolution. Common Sense (1776) sold in the hundreds of thousands and made the case for independence to ordinary colonists; he followed it with The American Crisis, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. He is one of the internet’s most fabricated-for names — which makes a genuinely sourced line like this one worth flagging.