Top 665 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Green Ingersoll - Page 3

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

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

Our fathers knew that the flag was never intended to protect any man who wanted to assail it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Every fact in the universe will fit every other fact in the universe. A lie never did, never will fit anything but another lie made to fit it. Never, never!

All the punishment in the world will not reform a man, unless he knows that he who inflicts it upon him does it for the sake of reformation, and really and truly loves him, and has his good at heart. Punishment inflicted for gratifying the appetite makes man afraid but debases him.

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.

A good character, like a Gibraltar, will stand against the testimony of all the rascals in the universe, no matter how they assail it. It will stand, and it will stand firmer and grander the more it is assaulted.

Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to protect the rights of man, I am a rebel. Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to give man liberty, to clothe him in all his just rights, I am on the side of that rebellion.

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.

Religion is not theory - it is life. It is not intellectual conviction - it is divine humanity, and nothing else.

I believe in living for this world - that's my doctrine - to make everybody happy that you can.

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

Every man should be the intellectual proprietor of himself, honest with himself, and intellectually hospitable; and upon every brain, reason should be enthroned as king.

Fear, prejudice, malice, and the love of approbation bribe a thousand men where gold bribes one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Voltaire, as full of life as summer is full of blossoms, giving his ideas upon all subjects at the expense of prince and king, was exiled to England.

Voltaire made up his mind to destroy the superstition of his time. He fought with every weapon that genius could devise or use. He was the greatest of all caricaturists, and he used this wonderful gift without mercy.

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.

Liberty is the breath of progress.

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.

In France, the people were the sport of a king's caprice. Everywhere was the shadow of the Bastille. It fell upon the sunniest field, upon the happiest home.

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

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.

Freedom has invented every useful machine, from the lowest to the highest, from the simplest to the most complex.

The truth is that nearly everybody is right about some things and wrong about most things; and if a man's testimony is not to be taken until he is right on every subject, witnesses will be extremely scarce.

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.'

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.

You have to change men physically before you change them intellectually.

The walls of that grand edifice called a good character have to be worked at during life.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is no common sense in going to the field to fight and leaving a man at home to undo all that you accomplish.

The place does not make the man, nor the sceptre the king. Greatness is from within.

George Eliot tenderly carried in her heart the burdens of our race. She looked through pity's tears upon the faults and frailties of mankind.

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.

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 religion that has to be supported by law is without value, not only, but a fraud and a curse. The religious argument that has to be supported by a musket is hardly worth making.

Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government - the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

The Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife Fausta, and his eldest son Crispus, the same year that he convened the Council of Nice to decide whether Jesus Christ was a man or the Son of God. The council decided that Christ was consubstantial with the father. This was in the year 325. We are thus indebted to a wife-murderer for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the Savior.

Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.

There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women - of free mothers.

If the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?