John Burroughs: "I honor the memory of Thomas Paine and am glad to know that it shines brighter and brighter as time goes on."
Rear Admiral George W. Melville: "Greater honor is coming to the name of Thomas Paine as the years roll on.... In America he will always be known as one of the greatest and brightest minds that stood for the liberties of men."
Hon. D. W. Wilder: "After a century of abuse it is pleasing to know that a pure patriot and a very great man is at last being appreciated."
Theodore Schroeder: "Paine's sympathy for mankind had made kings his foes, his mercy cost him his liberty, his generosity kept him in poverty, his charity made him enemies, and by intellectual honesty he lost his friends. Federalist judges of election, for whose liberty he had fought, denied him the right to vote, because he was a citizen of France; imprisoned in France because he was not a citizen of France; maligned because he was brave; shunned because he was honest; hated by those to whom he had devoted his whole existence; denied a burial place in the soil he helped make free by the church which first taught him the lesson of humanity; thus ended the life of Thomas Paine.
"The world is growing better, more just and more hospitable. The narrow intolerance which once threatened to erase Paine's hame from the pages of history is passing away. Gradually we are coming to know that a kingly crown or priestly robe never rested upon a nobler man."
"His unselfish devotion to the rights of man is now being recognized, and the brutal intolerance which tried to obliterate his name from history is rapidly disappearing."—Yoshiro Oyama.
"The verdict of a century is being reversed today. In a little while the voice of detraction will be hushed forever."—Marshall J. Gauvin.
Hector Macpherson: "The wheel of time has come round full circle. Men of all sorts and conditions are willing to do justice to the man who, in the midst of great obstacles and with unflinching and self-sacrificing purpose held aloft the lighted torch of humanitarianism, and passed it on to succeeding generations."
George Allen White: "What turbulent curses and ravenous conspiracies fell for decades afoul thy noble head! How did the welkin ring with the uttermost invectives of hell-brewed hate! But a hundred years later and Thomas Paine—Thomas Paine the unspeakable—has been rehabilitated. His fame is secure and untarnished now. Rising the monuments. Splendid the horoscope of his future. Smoking the calumets. Like an impossible, unbelievable dream vanishes the memory of those tempestuous days of shameless bigotry."
Judge Charles B. Waite: "King and priest stood side by side, the one enslaving the body, the other the mind. Men and women were subjected to the most atrocious cruelties. Now and then, while mankind were struggling with their destiny, voices were heard—voices in the night—penetrating the surrounding gloom and reaching every ear. Such a voice was that of Shelley; such a voice was that of Voltaire; such a voice was that of Goethe; such was that of Thomas Paine.