Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

413 Sourced Quotes

I love to think of the whole universe together as one eternal fact. I love to think that everything is alive; that crystallization is itself a step toward joy. I love to think that when a bud bursts into blossom: it feels a thrill. I love to have the universe full of feeling and full of joy, and not full of simple dead, inert matter, managed by an old bachelor for all eternity.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Environment is a sculptor - a painter. If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.' If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.

Robert G. Ingersoll
How any human being ever has had the impudence to speak against the right to speak, is beyond the power of my imagination. Here is a man who speaks-who exercises a right that he, by his speech, denies. Can liberty go further than that? Is there any toleration possible beyond the liberty to speak against liberty-the real believer in free speech allowing others to speak against the right to speak?

Robert G. Ingersoll
At thirty most men have prejudices rather than opinions-that is to say, rather than judgments-and few men have lived to be sixty without materially modifying the opinions they held at thirty.

Robert G. Ingersoll
The man who invented the telescope found out more about heaven than the closed eyes of prayer ever discovered.

Robert G. Ingersoll
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
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 G. Ingersoll
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 G. Ingersoll
Nothing could be more dangerous to the existence of this Republic than to introduce religion into politics

Robert G. Ingersoll
They knew no better, but I do not propose to follow the example of a barbarian because he was honestly a barbarian.

Robert G. Ingersoll
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 G. Ingersoll
The mechanic, when a wheel refuses to turn, never thinks of dropping on his knees and asking the assistance of some divine power. He knows there is a reason. He knows that something is too large or too small; that there is something wrong with his machine; and he goes to work and he makes it larger or smaller, here or there, until the wheel will turn.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Burns had his faults, his frailties. He was intensely human. Still, I would rather appear at the "Judgment Seat" drunk, and be able to say that I was the author of "A man's a man for 'a that," than to be perfectly sober and admit that I had lived and died a Scotch Presbyterian.

Robert G. Ingersoll
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 G. Ingersoll
Today the intelligence of the world denies the miraculous. Ignorance is the soil of the supernatural. The foundation of Christianity has crumbled, has disappeared, and the entire fabric must fall. The natural is true. The miraculous is false.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Nothing is greater than to break the chains from the bodies of men - nothing nobler than to destroy the phantom of the soul.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Abraham Lincoln was, in my judgment, in many respects, the grandest man ever President of the United States. Upon his monument these words should be written: "Here sleeps the only man in the history of the world who, having been clothed with almost absolute power, never abused it, except upon the side of mercy."

Robert G. Ingersoll
The combined wisdom and genius of all mankind cannot possibly conceive of an argument against liberty of thought.

Robert G. Ingersoll
The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes - more important than gold or houses or lands - more important than art or science - more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.

Robert G. Ingersoll
As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The bible was not written by a woman. Within its leaves there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her.

Robert G. Ingersoll
Diderot took the ground that, if orthodox religion be true Christ was guilty of suicide. Having the power to defend himself he should have used it.

Robert G. Ingersoll