Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

413 Sourced Quotes

It is perfectly delightful to take advantage of the conscientious labors of those who go through and through volume after volume, divide with infinite patience the gold from the dross, and present us with the pure and shining coin. Such men may be likened to bees who save us numberless journeys by giving us the fruit of their own.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Lincoln was not a type. He stands alone - no ancestors, no fellows, no successors.

Robert G. Ingersoll
It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.

Robert G. Ingersoll
The old lady who said there must be a devil, else how could they make pictures that looked exactly like him, reasoned like a trained theologian - like a doctor of divinity.

Robert G. Ingersoll
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 G. Ingersoll
The few took advantage of the ignorant many. They pretended to have received messages from the Unknown. They stood between the helpless multitude and the gods. They were the carriers of flags of truce. At the court of heaven they presented the cause of man, and upon the labor of the deceived they lived.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Take the word Liberty from human speech and all the other words become poor, withered, meaningless sounds - but with that word realized - with that word understood, the world becomes a paradise.

Robert G. Ingersoll
I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.

Robert G. Ingersoll
He who commends the brutalities of the past, sows the seeds of future crimes.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Commerce is the great civilizer. We exchange ideas when we exchange fabrics.

Robert G. Ingersoll
All religious systems enslave the mind. Certain things are demanded-certain things must be believed-certain things must be done-and the man who becomes the subject or servant of this superstition must give up all idea of indivuality or hope of intellectual growth or progress.

Robert G. Ingersoll
I do not know what inventions are in the brain of the future; I do not know what garments of glory may be woven for the world in the loom of years to be; we are just on the edge of the great ocean of discovery. I do not know what is to be discovered...

Robert G. Ingersoll
I want no heaven for which I must give my reason; no happiness in exchange for my liberty, and no immortality that demands the surrender of my individuality. Better rot in the windowless tomb, to which there is no door but the red mouth of the pallid worm, than to wear the jeweled collar of a god.

Robert G. Ingersoll
There may or may not be a Supreme Ruler of the universe-but we are certain that man exists, and we believe that freedom is the condition of progress; that it is the sunshine of the mental and moral world, and that without it man will go back to the den of savagery, and wll become the fit associate of wild and ferocious beasts.

Robert G. Ingersoll
The moment you introduce a despotism in the world of thought, you succeed in making hypocrites - and you get in such a position that you never know what your neighbor thinks.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Had he been willing to live a hypocrite, he would have been respectable, he at least could have died surrounded by other hypocrites, and at his death there would have been an imposing funeral, with miles of carriages, filled with hypocrites, and above his hypocritical dust there would have been a hypocritical monument covered with lies.

Robert G. Ingersoll
They knew that it was necessary to believe these things and to love God. They knew that there could be no salvation except by faith, and through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

Robert G. Ingersoll
In the search for truth - that everything in nature seems to hide - man needs the assistance of all his faculties. All the senses should be awake.

Robert G. Ingersoll
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 G. Ingersoll
Don't you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don't you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air? I am not blaming anybody. I am just telling how it is.

Robert G. Ingersoll
The man who accepts opinions because they have been entertained by distinguished people, is a mental snob.

Robert G. Ingersoll
It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god.

Robert G. Ingersoll
The ministers, who preached at these revivals, were in earnest. They were zealous and sincere. They were not philosophers. To them science was the name of a vague dread - a dangerous enemy. They did not know much, but they believed a great deal.

Robert G. Ingersoll
He who treats his friends and enemies alike, has neither love nor justice.

Robert G. Ingersoll
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 G. Ingersoll
The whip degrades; a severe father teaches his children to dissemble; their love is pretense, and their obedience a species of self-defense. Fear is the father of lies.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.

Robert G. Ingersoll
The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Twenty years after the death of Luther there were more Catholics than when he was born. And twenty years after the death of Voltaire there were millions less than when he was born.

Robert G. Ingersoll
As long as every question is answered by the word "God," scientific inquiry is simply impossible.

Robert G. Ingersoll