In Defense of Passive Voice

We should all be able to recite Dickens's famous line,
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness";
and many of us can finish this J. Austen quote,
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that."

If these authors, whom we have proclaimed
through the ages to have produced
some of the greatest writings we have known,
used a passive voice to tell their tale,
why then do we now state to the same audience
that voice is an evil so great that the flowing cloud
of ink from neither pen nor printer can be allowed
to touch their paper with its words?