Top 100 Robert Ingersoll Quotes
#1. In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.
Charlie Chaplin
#2. Robert Ingersoll came to [a small Midwest town] to speak ... , and after he had gone the question of the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens.
Sherwood Anderson
#3. One of the bravest, grandest champions of human liberty the world has ever seen.
{Darrow on the great Robert Ingersoll}
Clarence Darrow
#4. The future historian will rank him as one of the heroes of the nineteenth century.
{Stanton's opinion of the great Robert Ingersoll}
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#5. The Catholics of Maryland were the first people on the new continent to declare universal religious toleration. Let this be remembered to their eternal honor.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#7. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#8. In order to appreciate a great man, we must know his surroundings. We must understand the scope of the drama in which he played - the part he acted - and we must also know his audience.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#9. Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State. Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave and independent man - the man of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#10. Nature is filled with tendencies and obstructions. Extremes beget limitations, even as a river by its own swiftness creates obstructions for itself.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#12. 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
#13. 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
#15. If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish - if a little more enlightened, religion would perish.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#16. The government, in my judgment, cannot create money; the government can give its note, like an individual, and the prospect of its being paid determines its value.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#18. The God of hell should be held in loathing, contempt and scorn. A god who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved; cursed, not worshipped. A heaven presided over by such a god must be below the meanest hell.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#20. Call me infidel, call me atheist, call me what you will, I intend so to treat my children, that they can come to my grave and truthfully say: 'He who sleeps here never gave us a moment of pain. From his lips, now dust, never came to us an unkind word.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#22. Perjury is the basest and meanest and most cowardly of crimes. What can it do? Perjury can change the common air that we breathe into the axe of an executioner.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#23. The greatest superstition now entertained by public men is that hypocrisy is the royal road to success.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#24. If we admit that some infinite being has controlled the destinies of persons and peoples, history becomes a most cruel and bloody farce.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#25. Not one of the learned gentlemen who pretend that the Mosaic laws are filled with justice and intelligence, would live, for a moment, in any country where such laws were in force.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#26. The walls of that grand edifice called a good character have to be worked at during life.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#27. I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#28. The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#29. Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers: It is the only prayer that deserves an answer - good, honest, noble work.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#30. If the Bible is true, it needs no inspiration, and - if not true, inspiration can do it no good.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#34. Roscoe Conkling was a man of superb courage. He not only acted without fear, but he had that fortitude of soul which bears the consequences of the course pursued without complaint.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#35. The ideas of right and wrong change with the experience of the race, and this change is wrought by the gradual ascertaining of consequences - of results.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#36. They say: Belief is important. I say: No, actions are important. Judge by deed, not by creed.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#38. No one can control his own opinion or his own belief. My belief was forced upon me by my surroundings. I am the product of all circumstances that have in any way touched me.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#40. Jehovah was not a moral god. He had all the vices and he lacked all the virtues. He generally carried out all his threats, but he never faithfully kept a promise.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#41. A man is not moral because he is obedient through fear or ignorance. Morality lives in the realm of perceived obligation ...
Robert Green Ingersoll
#42. Nobody ever saw anybody who had seen anybody who had heard of anybody that had ever seen anybody that had ever seen one of the original Hebrew manuscripts.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#43. The careful reader of the New Testament will find three Christs described: - One who wished to preserve Judaism - one who wished to reform it, and one who built a system of his own
Robert Green Ingersoll
#44. I believe in the fireside. I believe in the democracy of home. I believe in the republicanism of the family. I believe in liberty, equality and love.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#45. Age after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and heartless have ensnared and enslaved the simple and innocent, and nowhere, in all the annals of mankind, has any god succored the oppressed
Robert Green Ingersoll
#46. I believe that labor is a blessing. It never was and never will be a curse. It is a blessed thing to labor for ... the ones you love. It is a blessed thing to have an object in life - something to do - something to call into play your best thoughts, to develop your faculties and to make you a man.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#47. Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did and never will agree.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#48. As long as every question is answered by the word "God," scientific inquiry is simply impossible.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#50. I would rather be a beggar and spend my money like a king, than be a king and spend money like a beggar.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#51. 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
#53. I believe in living for this world - that's my doctrine - to make everybody happy that you can.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#54. I will live by the standard of reason, and if thinking in accordance with reason takes me to perdition, then I will go to hell with my reason rather than to heaven without it.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#55. [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
#56. In all ages the people have honored those who dishonored them. They have worshiped their destroyers; they have canonized the most gigantic liars, and buried the great thieves in marble and gold. Under the loftiest monuments sleeps the dust of murder.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#57. To avoid pain we must know the conditions of health. For the accomplishment of this end we must rely upon investigation instead of faith, upon labor in place of prayer. Most misery is produced by ignorance. Passions sow the seeds of pain.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#58. I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree that they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm off guesses as demonstrated truths.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#60. 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
#61. The man who invented the telescope found out more about heaven than the closed eyes of prayer ever discovered.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#62. Creationists use facts the same way a drunk uses a lightpost: for support instead of illumination
Robert Green Ingersoll
#63. Music was born of love. Had there never been any human affection, there never could have been uttered a strain of music.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#65. So far as I am concerned, I think more of reasons than of reputations, more of principles than of persons, more of nature than of names, more of facts than of faiths.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#66. There is more real devotional feeling summoned from the temple of the mind by great music than by any sermon ever delivered.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#67. As long as we can get redress in the courts, as long as the laws shall be honestly administered, as long as honesty and intelligence sit upon the bench, as long as intelligence sits in the chairs of jurors, this country will stand, the law will be enforced, and the law will be respected.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#68. As a matter of fact, no one knows that God exists and no one knows that God does not exist. To my mind there is no evidence that God exists - that this world is governed by a being of infinite goodness, wisdom and power, but I do not pretend to know.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#70. I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#72. The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#73. And yet this same Deity says to me, resist not evil; pray for those that despitefully use you; love your enemies, but I will eternally damn mine. It seems to me that even gods should practice what they preach.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#74. Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#75. Darwin has done more to change human thought than all the priests who have existed.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#76. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#77. We need men with moral courage to speak and write their real thoughts, and to stand by their convictions, even to the very death.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#79. There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women - of free mothers.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#80. There is a quiet about the life of a farmer, and the hope of a serene old age, that no other business or profession can promise.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#81. 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
#82. The ages of muscle and miracle - of fists and faith - are passing away.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#83. To know that the Bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and cannot exist - all this is but the beginning of wisdom.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. You have no idea how many men are spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shakespeare had graduated at Oxford, he might have been a quibbling attorney, or a hypocritical parson.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#88. I have had some trouble in regarding evil as having been intended by infinite Goodness.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#89. There is only one way to be happy, and that is to make somebody else so, and you cannot be happy by going cross lots; you have got to go the regular turnpike road.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#90. 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
#93. I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#94. This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#95. The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn. The less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything ...
Robert G. Ingersoll
#96. Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#99. In every religion the priest insists on five things -
First: There is a God.
Second: He has made known his will.
Third: He has selected me to explain this message.
Fourth: We will now take up a collection; and
Fifth: Those who fail to subscribe will certainly be damned.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#100. I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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