Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes

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If I owe Smith ten dollars and God forgives me, that doesn't pay Smith.

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.

Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne.

Kindness is the sunshine in which virtue grows.

The more liberty you give away the more you will have.

I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and depth; that there are no walls nor fences, nor prohibited places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought.

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.

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.

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.

The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had the individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.

For the most part, we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs.

The mind cannot be securely anchored. If we do not advance, we go backward. If we do not grow, we decay. If we do not develop, we shrink and shrivel.

In spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God.

The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.

Voltaire lighted a torch and gave to others the sacred flame. The light still shines and will as long as man loves liberty and seeks for truth.

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.

If matter cannot be destroyed, cannot be annihilated, it could not have been created. The indestructible must be uncreatable.

There can be goodness without much intelligence - but it seems to me that perfect intelligence and perfect goodness must go together.

He who does not want does not act.

Taste and love are not the servants of the will. Love is and must be free. It rises from the heart like perfume from a flower.

Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book and creed and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free.

Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did and never will agree.

It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about.

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.

There are so many societies, so many churches, so many -isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career.

Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight.

As long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power.

If you wish to reflect credit upon your parents, accomplish more than they did, solve problems that they could not understand, and build better than they knew.

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.

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.

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.

The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.

Nature is filled with tendencies and obstructions. Extremes beget limitations, even as a river by its own swiftness creates obstructions for itself.

The truth is that all great men have had great mothers. Great women have had, as a rule, great fathers.

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.

Kings had their clowns, the people their actors and musicians. Shakespeare was scheduled as a servant. It is thus that successful stupidity has always treated genius.

When men are prosperous, they are in love with life. Nature grows beautiful, the arts begin to flourish, there is work for painter and sculptor, the poet is born, the stage is erected - and this life with which men are in love is represented in a thousand forms.

Shakespeare pursued the highway of the right. He did not seek to put his characters in a position where it was right to do wrong.

The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue - or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes.

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.

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.

I simply claim that what ideas I have, I have a right to express; and that any man who denies that right to me is an intellectual thief and robber.

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.

I say, let us think. Let each one express his thought. Let us become investigators, not followers, not cringers and crawlers. If there is in Heaven an infinite being, he never will be satisfied with the worship of cowards and hypocrites.

Our fathers worshiped the golden calf. The worst you can say of an American now is, he worships the gold of the calf.

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.

Every good government is made up of good families. The unit of good government is the family, and anything that tends to destroy the family is perfectly devilish and infamous.

The grandest ambition that any man can possibly have is to so live and so improve himself in heart and brain as to be worthy of the love of some splendid woman; and the grandest ambition of any girl is to make herself worthy of the love and adoration of some magnificent man.

The man who has really won the love of one good woman in this world, I do not care if he dies in the ditch a beggar - his life has been a success.

Whoever marries simply for himself will make a mistake; but whoever loves a woman so well that he says, 'I will make her happy,' makes no mistake. And so with the woman who says, 'I will make him happy.'

The doctrine of immortality rests upon human affection. We love; therefore, we wish to live.

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.

All the men of wealth should remember that everybody in a community has got, in some way, to be supported. I want to see them so that they can support themselves by their own labor.

Most people are Democrats because they hate something; most people are Republicans because they love something.

There may be another life, and if there is, the best way to prepare for it is by making somebody happy in this.

I hope there is another life, for I would like to see how things come out in this world when I am dead.

There are times when a falsehood well told bridges over quite a difficulty, but in the long run, you had better tell the truth, even if you swim the creek.

The American people do not like neutrality. They would rather a man were on the wrong side than on neither.

Neutrality is generally used as a mask to hide unusual bitterness. Sometimes it hides what it is - nothing. It always stands for hollowness of head or bitterness of heart, sometimes for both.

I do not believe anything comes by chance. I regard the present as the necessary child of a necessary past.

It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.

Walt Whitman defended the sacredness of love, the purity of passion - the passion that builds every home and fills the world with art and song.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

The great man who gives a true transcript of his mind fascinates and instructs. Most writers suppress individuality. They wish to please the public.

In every age in which books have been produced, the governing class, the respectable, have been opposed to the works of real genius.

If the guardians of society, the protectors of 'young persons,' could have had their way, we should have known nothing of Byron or Shelley. The voices that thrill the world would now be silent.

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.

Many Americans do not understand that the officers of the government are simply the servants of the people.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

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.

I can imagine no sweeter way to end one's life than in the quiet of the country, out of the mad race for money, place and power - far from the demands of business - out of the dusty highway where fools struggle and strive for the hollow praise of other fools.

Whoever labors for the happiness of those he loves elevates himself, no matter whether he works in the dreary shop or the perfumed field.

Homes make patriots. He who has sat by his own fireside with wife and children will defend it. Few men have been patriotic enough to shoulder a musket in defense of a boarding house. The prosperity and glory of our country depend upon the number of people who are the owners of homes.

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.

Good nature is the cheapest commodity in the world, and love is the only thing that will pay ten percent, to borrower and lender both.

Happiness is the legal-tender of the soul. Joy is wealth.

A good way to make children tell the truth is to tell it yourself. Keep your word with your child the same as you would with your banker.

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.

If the government can make money, what on earth does it collect taxes for you and me for? Why don't it make what money it wants, take the taxes out, and give the balance to us?

In the grave should be buried the prejudices and passions born of conflict. Charity should hold the scales in which are weighed the deeds of men.

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.

They who gain applause and power by pandering to the mistakes, the prejudices and passions of the multitude are the enemies of liberty.

He who refuses to stoop, who cannot be bribed by the promise of success or the fear of failure - who walks the highway of the right, and in disaster stands erect, is the only victor.

Nothing is more despicable than to reach fame by crawling, position by cringing.

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.

It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.

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.

The literature of many lands is rich with the tributes that gratitude, admiration and love have paid to the great and honored dead. These tributes disclose the character of nations, the ideals of the human race.

How poor this world would be without its graves, without the memories of its mighty dead. Only the voiceless speak forever.

In my judgment, the American people are too brave, too charitable, too generous, too magnanimous, to believe in the infamous dogma of an eternal hell.

Man never had an idea - man will never have an idea, except those supplied to him by his surroundings. Every idea in the world that man has came to him by nature.

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