Stoughton Cooley: "One of the most devoted spirits in the cause of liberty."
East Anglian Daily Times: "The Rights of Man' and the 'Age of Reason' may have scandalized orthodox opinion, but their author was never engaged in any but a generous and noble cause, that had complete personal liberty for its sole object and aim."
"They [Lord Bolingbroke and Thomas Paine] were alike in making bitter enemies of the priests and pharisees of their day. Both were honest men; both advocates of human liberty."—Thomas Jefferson.
J. C. Hannon: "Liberty, hunted around the globe, has ever found its highest hope, its safest refuge, in the affections of those upon whose grand and noble foreheads the tyrants of the world have ever branded the indelible stigma of Infidelity. Thomas Paine, who has done more for human liberty than any other man who ever lived, has borne it with a grace amounting to sublimity."
Dr. J. B. Wilson: "Towering spires, blazing altars, jeweled palaces, and golden thrones had awed and subdued the Eastern nations for all time. It remained for Thomas Paine, standing upon the shores of this western world, to tear away the blinds of superstition, hypocrisy, selfishness, and imperial pretense, and awaken mankind to a consciousness of its own power and capacity for self-government."
Walter Holloway: "Age after age men have struggled toward the ideal, with toil and tears, praying in their pain, sobbing out their sorrows in the half-light of hope, forever beaten back from the coveted goal. Wise men long ago saw that the gods must be dethroned and the government of earth given into the hands of men. That was the passionate dream of Thomas Paine."
M. Felix Rabbe: "Thomas Paine has suffered the fate of all those who, listening only to their conscience of honest manhood, solely attentive to the voices of Nature and Reason, raised principles above all considerations of frontiers, parties, sects, and sacrificed without hesitation the mean calculations of a temporizing policy to the higher interests of eternal justice."
"The world has had few such men, those who divest themselves of selfish motives of gain or pride and are willing to suffer obloquy and poverty for a conviction."—Edward C. Wentworth.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton.: "We cannot be too grateful to those who through poverty, persecution, imprisonment, and death have given us the light of science in the place of blind faith on questions of government, religion, and social life. Thomas Paine is a worthy name in the long line of martyrs to liberal political and religious principles."
"Poor, abused, maligned, hated and persecuted, Paine stood alone in the ocean of superstition, ignorance and prejudice as the Liberty Statue of religious thought while the waves of malice, ostracism and anathema lashed against his kind and manly brow."—Rev. David W. Bash.