Werner's Encyclopedia (Ed. 1899): "Its opening words, 'These are the times that try men's souls,' became a battle cry."
Norman Hapgood, LL.B.: "The last sentence [of the first 'Crisis'] sounds like a prophecy and the first sentence, 'These are the times that try men's souls,' was the watchword [at the battle of Trenton]."
George Lippard: "In the full prime of early manhood, he joins the army of the Revolution; he shares the crust and the cold with Washington and his men; he is with those brave soldiers on the toilsome march, with them by the camp fire, with them in the hour of battle.
"Is the day dark? Has the battle been bloody? Do the American soldiers despair? Hark! that printing press yonder, which moves with the American camp in all its wanderings, is scattering pamphlets through the ranks of the army—pamphlets written by the author-soldier; written sometimes on the head of a drum, or by the midnight fire, or amid the corpses of the dead."
"Such words as these stirred up the starved Continentals to the attack on Trenton, and there in the dawn of that glorious morning, George Washington, standing sword in hand over the dead body of the Hessian Rhol, confessed the magic influence of the author-hero's pen."
"Under that cloud, by Washington's side, was silently at work the force that lifted it. Marching by day, listening to the consultations of Washington and his generals, Paine wrote by the camp fires; the winter storms, the Delaware waves, were mingled with his ink; the half-naked soldiers in their troubled sleep dreaming of their distant homes, the skulking deserter creeping off in the dusk, the pallid face of the heavy-hearted commander, made the awful shadows beneath which was written that leaflet."—Dr. Conway.
Of this work Sir George Trevelyan writes: "The 'Crisis' was an impassioned appeal to arms. That circumstance endowed Paine's glowing rhetoric with a special value in the estimation of Americans. To their mind's eye the little work was adorned by an imaginary frontispiece of a soldier, writing by the watch-fire's light, with his comrades slumbering round him; and it was among those comrades that the author found his warmest admirers and his most convinced disciples."
"These words were fire and warmed the soldiers; they were meat and drink for the famishing; they were clothes for the naked. The soldiers were filled with a courage new and unknown. The battle of Trenton came, and as the soldiers entered that conflict, all down the ranks rang the battle cry, 'These are the times that try men's souls.' The battle was fought and won. The army of the patriots had entered upon a new career. And thus he wrote and wrought to the end of the immortal struggle."—Dr. John E. Roberts.
"In the midnight of Valley Forge the 'Crisis' was the only star that glittered in the broad horizon of despair."—Col. Ingersoll.
"Paine was the real founder of our Republic. Without his 'Common Sense' the independence of the American Colonies never would have been declared; without his 'Crisis' it never could have been won. Without his services this country, like Canada, India, Australia and South Africa, today would be a part of the British Empire.