What is the most hubristic line ever written? Against some very stiff competition I would say it is that famous line of Thomas Paine, from the February 1776 appendix to his pamphlet Common Sense: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’
One of the problems of the line is that even just typing it or reading it brings goose bumps. Not just because it is perfectly phrased, but because it appeals to such a basic emotion. It is an emotion similar to the one which always makes me well up at the end of Peter Grimes: ‘Turn the skies back, and begin again.’ It’s moving, in that case, because it is impossible.
Blair and his colleagues thought they could begin Britain anew, but instead they set up a raft of problems
Yet for some reason the idea that human beings as a collective can begin again always brings a shiver of hope.
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