Manchester Guardian (June 8, 1909): "He and his works became the great influence which set up everywhere constitutional societies and encouraged political and religious freedom of thought. He became the interpreter to England of the principles of the two Revolutions, and his words and ideas leavened speculations among the masses of the English people, and still leaven them today. We may forget him or remember him awry, but the very stuff of our brains is woven in the loom of his devising." James K. Hosmer, LL. D.: "Few writers have exerted a more powerful influence since the world began, if the claim set forth at the time and never refuted be just, that his 'Common Sense' made possible the Declaration of Independence and therefore the United States of America." Constitutional Gazette (Feb. 24, 1776): "The author introduces [in 'Common Sense'] a new system of polices as widely different from the old as the Copernican system is from the Ptolemaic. This extraordinary performance contains as surprising a discovery in politics as the works of Sir Isaac Newton do in philosophy." "It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting."--_Sir George Trevelyan._ Paul Louis Courrier (1824): "Never did any portly volume effect so much for the human race. Rallying all hearts and minds to the party of Independence, it decided the issue of that great conflict which, ended for America, is still proceeding all over the rest of the world." "Incisive sentences,... as direct and vivid in their appeal as any sentences of Swift."--_Woodrow Wilson._ "Like a thunderbolt from the sky came Paine's magnificent argument for liberty... No pamphlet ever written sold in such vast numbers, nor did any ever before or since produce such marvelous results."--_Ella Wheeler Wilcox._ "Who could with almost one stroke of his pen, turn the people in a radically new direction? Who must exert an influence that had never, in any crisis of history, been exerted by one man before? The American Republic today, with its illimitable glory and belting a continent, can only reply: Thomas Paine!"--_Samuel P. Putnam._ "The soul of Thomas Paine went forth in that book. Every line of it glittered with the fires of his brain. It was written as a poet writes his song.... It was like the flowing of a fountain, the sweep of a wind, the rush of a comet."--Ibid. The publication of Thomas Paine's immortal pamphlet, 'Common Sense,' will ever deserve to rank among the supremely important events of history. The farther we are removed from it in time the larger it will loom."--_Rev. Thomas B. Gregory._ "This work marks an era in the history of the world. Its interest will last longer than nations."--_Hon. Elizur Wright._