Hon. John J. Lentz, M. C.: "The pen of the author of 'Common Sense' and the 'Crisis' did more to liberate the Colonies than did the sword of the commander in chief of the Colonial armies."
Prof. William Denton: "The pen of Paine accomplished more for American liberty than the sword of Washington."
General Lee of Revolutionary fame says: "The pen of Thomas Paine did more to achieve our Independence than did the sword of Washington." Joel Barlow, one of the most popular literary men of his time, a chaplain in the American Revolution and a fellow-worker of Paine for political liberty, both in England and France, says: "We may venture to say, without fear of contradiction, that the great American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the sword of Washington." Even Paine's vilest calumniator, Cheetham, makes this admission: "His pen was an appendage to the army as necessary and as formidable as its cannon."
Reuben Post Halleck, L.L. D.: "Some have said that the pen of Thomas Paine was worth more to the cause of liberty than twenty thousand men. In the darkest hours he inspired the colonists with hope and enthusiasm... He had an almost Shakespearean intuition of what would appeal to the exigencies of each case."
"The real man back of the American Revolution was the man who had the ideas and not the man behind the guns.... Paine fought with the weapon of the future, and he was one of the very first that made it powerful. Paine's weapon was the pen, not the sword. Washington conquered small groups of men that had been living twenty or thirty years, but Thomas Paine conquered the prejudices of thousands of years."—Herbert N. Casson.
Thomas Jefferson: "These two persons [Lord Bolingbroke and Thomas Paine] differed remarkably in the style of their writings, each leaving a model of what is most perfect in both extremes of the simple' and the sublime. No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and familiarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language."
Abraham Lincoln: "I never tire of reading Paine."
Capel Lofft: "I am glad Paine is living: he cannot be even wrong without enlightening mankind, such is the vigor of his intellect, such the acuteness of his research, and such the force and vivid perspicuity of his expression."
Augustine Birrell, M. P.: "Paine was without knowing it, a born journalist. His capacity for writing on the spur of the moment was endless, and his delight in doing so was boundless."
Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott: "He was perhaps the most popular pamphleteer of the country."