"Paine is the first American writer who has a literary style, and we have not had so many since but that you may count them on the fingers of one hand."—Ibid.
L. Carroll Judson: "His intellectual powers suddenly burst into a blaze of light."
John Horne Tooke: "You are like Jove coming down upon us in a shower of gold."
"The man who coined the intellectual gold of the Eighteenth Century was Thomas Paine."—L. K. Washburn.
Ebenezer Elliott: "Paine is the greatest master of metaphor I have ever read."
"He was not only master of metaphor, he was master of principles. He imparted life to great ideas."—George Jacob Holyoake.
"The keenness of his intellect was matched by the brilliancy of his imagination. He stated a truth in a way that men could see, hear, and feel it. Take the following epigram: 'To argue with a man who has renounced the use of Reason is like administering medicine to the dead.'"—George W. Foote.
Prof. William Smyth: "Paine is a writer to be numbered with those few who are so supereminently fitted to address the great mass of mankind."
Dr. Charles Botta: "No writer, perhaps, ever possessed in a higher degree the art of moving and guiding the public at his will."
Elroy McKendree Avery: "No writer ever had a greater influence upon the events of his own time than he."