Louisa Harding: "One would imagine that even the religious bigot would know that he [McMaster] drew for us the picture of a great man, looming up tall and wide behind the chronicler who strove to pull him down.... In the course of a careful, impartial investigation of the various lives of, and articles on, Paine, it became necessary to resort to the explanation of blinding religious prejudice; and that, too, having failed to fit the case, there seems to be no recourse save to use a shorter, uglier word—John Bach McMaster lies."
A little while ago a prominent American, misled by Paine's calumniators and too proud to retract it when the error was called to his attention, applied to the author-hero the brutal epithet "filthy little Atheist"—three falsehoods in three words, for Paine was neither filthy, little, nor an Atheist.
[See the works of President Theodore Roosevelt for
this quotation of his opinion of Thomas Paine. DW]
"Every syllable of that characterization is a shameful falsehood."—William M. Salter, A.M.
"One of the most transparently false and indefensible slanders that ever came from lip or pen."—J. P. Bland, B. D.
"Was he filthy? He was the friend and associate of Washington and Franklin. He was a member of the most conspicuous philosophical society in the new world. He was associated with the most distinguished men of the philosophical circles of France. Was he little? He entered an intellectual combat with Edmund Burke, and won immortal renown. Was he little? He was big enough and mighty enough to make the throne of Great Britain tremble. Was he little? He was big enough to make in America as well as in France the cause of human liberty his debtor forever "—Dr. John E. Roberts.
Commenting on this slander the Nation of England says: "After all, our feelings of resentment at such a brutality are assuaged by the reflection that whereas, this man, will in a quick generation sink to the obscurity from which a series of accidents lifted him for a few years, history will gradually set in its proper place among the makers of the Republic the memory of the man whom he defamed."
"All this vilification is really the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius."—Elbert Hubbard.
Walt Whitman: "Paine was double damnably lied about."
"Anything lower, meaner, more contemptible, I cannot imagine, to take an aged man—a man tired to death after a complicated life of toil, struggle, anxiety—weak, dragged down, at death's door;... then to pull him into the mud, distort everything he does and says; oh, it's infamous."