Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes

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.

Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.

If God objected to [people with various handicaps], he ought not have created such people.

Custom meets us at the cradle and leaves us only at the tomb.

I am going to put the Bible out of business.

Fear is a dagger with which hypocrisy assassinates the soul.

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

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.

It may be that ministers really think that their prayers do good, and it may be that frogs imagine that their croaking brings spring.

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

If this religion is true, then there is only one Savior, only one narrow path to life. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other religion.

My objection to Christianity is that it is infinitely cruel, infinitely selfish, and, I might add, infinitely absurd.

Upon the great questions of origin, of destiny, of immortality, of . . . other worlds, every honest man must say, 'I do not know.' Upon these questions, this is the creed of intelligence.

Belief is not a matter of choice, but of conviction.

A mortgage casts a shadow on the sunniest field.

A man is not moral because he is obedient through fear or ignorance. Morality lives in the realm of perceived obligation.

Either god should have written a book to fit my brain, or he should have made my brain to fit his book.

Only those who live on the labor of the ignorant are the enemies of science. Real love and real religion are in no danger from science. The more we know the safer all good things are.

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.

Fear is religion, courage is science.

Liberty is the breath of progress.

Shakespeare has done far more for the world than the Bible.

Every cradle asks us, Whence? and every coffin, Whither? The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed.

Do not trust those in whom the compulsion to punish is strong.

I have not the slightest confidence in 'spiritual manifestations.'

All the professors in all the religious colleges in this country rolled into one, would not equal Charles Darwin.

The closer I'm bound in love to you, the closer I am to free.

If we admit that some infinite being has controlled the destinies of persons and peoples, history becomes a most cruel and bloody farce.

There is no evidence that God ever interfered in the affairs of man. The hand of earth is stretched uselessly towards heaven. From the clouds there comes no help.

Every man who expresses an honest thought is a soldier in the army of intellectual liberty.

The object of all education should be to increase the usefulness of man - usefulness to himself and others.

Commerce is the great civilizer.

A good deed is the best prayer.

The man who finds a truth lights a torch.

The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings.

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

A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility.

The triumph of justice is the only peace.

If we are immortal, it is a fact of nature, and that fact does not depend on bibles, on Christs, priest, or creeds.

Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud

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

One man in the right will finally get to be a majority.

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

If there be an infinite Being, he does not need our help - we need not waste our energies in his defense.

It is with men as with other things. The mullein needs only a year, but the oak a century, and the greatest men are those who have continued to grow as long as they have lived.

The savage prays to a stone that he calls a god, while the Christian prays to a god he calls a spirit, and the prayers of both are equally useful.

Grant others the same rights as you claim for yourself.

To the wise man, to the wise nation, the mistakes of the past are the torches of the present.

A miracle is the badge and brand of fraud. ... No intelligent, honest man ever pretended to perform a miracle, and never will.

Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power.