Top 100 Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes
#1. Honest investigation is utterly impossible within the pale of any church, for the reason, that if you think the church is right you will not investigate, and if you think it wrong, the church will investigate you.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#2. Let us account for all we see by the facts we know. If there are things for which we cannot account, let us wait for light.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#4. Ignorant people are apt to overrate the value of what is called education. The sons of the poor, having suffered the privations of poverty, think of wealth as the mother of joy.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#5. If you have ever clothed another with woe, as with a garment of pain, you will never be quite as happy as though you had not done that thing.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#6. The credulity of the church is decreasing, and the most marvelous miracles are not either 'explained,' or allowed to take refuge behind the mistakes of the translators, or hide in the drapery of allegory.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#7. [T]he blossom of benevolence, of charity, is the fairest flower, no matter whether it blooms by the side of a hovel, or bursts from a vine climbing the marble pillar of a palace. I respect no man because he is rich; I hold in contempt no man because he is poor.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#8. There is no common sense in going to the field to fight and leaving a man at home to undo all that you accomplish.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#9. The man who invented the telescope found out more about heaven than the closed eyes of prayer ever discovered.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#10. Creationists use facts the same way a drunk uses a lightpost: for support instead of illumination
Robert Green Ingersoll
#11. The Catholic Church is a thousand times better than your Protestant Church upon that question [of damnation]. The Catholic Church believes in purgatory - that is, a place where a fellow can get a chance to make a motion for a new trial.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#12. There are some truths, however, that we should never forget: Superstition has always been the relentless enemy of science; faith has been a hater of demonstration; hypocrisy has been sincere only in its dread of truth, and all religions are inconsistent with mental freedom.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#14. Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle, every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#15. Intellectual liberty [is] the right to think right and the right to think wrong. Thought is the means by which we endeavor to arrive at truth.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#16. I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#18. Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#19. I find that in this day and generation, the meanest men have the lowest estimate of woman; that the greater the man is, the grander he is, the more he thinks of mother, wife and daughter.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#20. Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#22. Every religion in the world has denounced every other religion as a fraud. That proves to me that they all tell the truth - about others.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#23. TO PLOW IS TO PRAY; TO PLANT IS TO PROPHESY,
AND THE HARVEST ANSWERS AND FULFILLS.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#24. For thousands of years people have been trying to force other people to think their way. Did they succeed? No. Will they succeed? No. Why? Because brute force is not an argument.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#26. Our fathers worshiped the golden calf. The worst you can say of an American now is, he worships the gold of the calf.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#28. The meanest hut with love in it is a palace fit for the gods, and a palace without love is a den only fit for wild beasts.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#29. When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then - and not until then - will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#30. I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#32. If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost..
Robert Green Ingersoll
#33. It has been said that a man of genius should select his ancestors with great care - and yet there does not seem to be as much in heredity as most people think. The children of the great are often small.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#35. The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#36. The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#38. Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#41. If God objected to [people with various handicaps], he ought not have created such people.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#42. If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow men. We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and friend.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#43. Reason is the light, the sun of the brain. It is the compass of the mind, the ever-constant Northern Star, the mountain peak that lifts itself above all clouds.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#44. When you go home, fill the house with joy so that the light of it will stream out the windows and doors and illuminate even the darkness. It is just as easy that way as any in the world.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#47. I have one sentiment for soldiers living and dead: cheers for the
living; tears for the dead.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#50. Custom is a prison, locked and barred by those who long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the keeping of the dead.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#52. Whoever labors for the happiness of those he loves elevates himself, no matter whether he works in the dreary shop or the perfumed field.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#53. If, with all the time at my disposal, with all the wealth of the resources of this vast universe, to do with as I will, I could not produce a better scheme of life than now prevails, I would be ashamed of my efforts and consider my work a humiliating failure.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#54. You cannot change the conclusion of the brain by torture, nor by social ostracism. But I will tell you what you can do by these and what you have done. You can make hypocrites by the million.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#55. One thing I do know, and that is, that neither hope, nor fear, belief, nor denial, can change the fact. It is as it is, and it will be as it must be.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#57. A prayer that must have a cannon behind it better never be uttered. Forgiveness ought not to go in partnership with shot and shell. Love need not carry knives and revolvers.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#59. Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#60. Sometime, it will be found that people can be changed only by changing their surroundings. It is alleged that, at least ninety-five percent of the criminals transported from England to Australia and other penal colonies, became good and useful citizens in a new world.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#61. If we are immortal, it is a fact of nature, and that fact does not depend on bibles, on Christs, priest, or creeds.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#62. We can conceive of eternity because we cannot conceive of a cessation of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest star and see infinite space beyond.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#64. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#68. I would rather live with the woman I love in a world full of trouble, than to live in heaven with nobody but men.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#69. I regard the rights of men and women equal. In Love's fair realm, husband and wife are king and queen, sceptered and crowned alike, and seated on the self-same throne.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#70. No system of religion should go in partnership with barbarism. Neither should any Christian feel it his duty to defend the savagery of the past.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#71. On every hand there seems to be design to defeat design. If God created man - if he is the father of us all, why did he make the criminals, the insane, the deformed and idiotic? Should the mother, who clasps to her breast an idiot child, thank God?
Robert Green Ingersoll
#72. Commerce makes friends, religion makes enemies; the one enriches, and the other impoverishes; the one thrives best where the truth is told, the other where falsehoods are believed.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#73. Justice, poised and balanced in eternal calm, will shake from the golden scales in which are weighed the acts of men, the very dust of prejudice and caste: No race, no color, no previous condition, can change the rights of men.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#74. The priests of one religion never credit the miracles of another religion. Is this because priests instinctively know priests?
Robert Green Ingersoll
#76. When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death - that is heroism.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#77. The American people do not like neutrality. They would rather a man were on the wrong side than on neither.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#78. The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#79. I want to tell you this: you cannot get the robe of hypocrisy on you so thick that the sharp eye of childhood will not see through every veil.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#80. Whether there is another life or not, if there is any being who gave me this, I shall thank him from the bottom of my heart, because, upon the whole, my life has been a joy.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#81. The Christians say, that among the ancient Jews, if you committed a crime you had to kill a sheep. Now they say 'charge it.' 'Put it on the slate.' The Savior will pay it. In this way, rascality is sold on credit, and the credit system in morals, as in business, breeds extravagance.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#82. I concluded that all religions had the same foundation - a belief in the supernatural - a power above nature that man could influence by worship - by sacrifice and prayer.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#83. Perish the infamous doctrine that man can have property in man. Let us resent with indignation every effort to put a chain upon our minds.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#84. He (Thomas Paine) saw oppression on every hand; injustice everywhere; hypocrisy at the altar; venality on the bench, tyranny on the throne; and with a splendid courage he espoused the cause of the weak against the strong
Robert Green Ingersoll
#85. The book, called the Bible, is filled with passages equally horrible, unjust and atrocious. This is the book to be read in schools in order to make our children loving, kind and gentle! This is the book they wish to be recognized in our Constitution as the source of all authority and justice!
Robert Green Ingersoll
#86. I think the man who eats the bread of idleness is under a certain obligation to speak well of labor.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#87. Voltaire! A name that excites the admiration of men, the malignity of priests. Pronounce that name in the presence of a clergyman, and you will find that you have made a declaration of war.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#89. Upon the great questions of origin, of destiny, of immortality, of ... other worlds, every honest man must say, 'I do not know.' Upon these questions, this is the creed of intelligence.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#90. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#91. How poor this world would be without its graves, without the memories of its mighty dead. Only the voiceless speak forever.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#92. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#93. The savage prays to a stone that he calls a god, while the Christian prays to a god he calls a spirit, and the prayers of both are equally useful.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#94. The great poets have sympathized with the people. They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#95. Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book and creed and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#96. They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#97. In the presence of death I affirm and reaffirm the truth of all that I have said against the superstitions of the world. I would say that much on the subject with my last breath.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#99. In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#100. If the reason I give is a good one, you will act upon it. If it is a bad one I cannot make it better by piling epithet upon epithet. There is no logic in abuse; there is no argument in an epithet.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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