Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes

To me, the most obscene word in our language is celibacy.

Prayer is of no avail. The lightning falls on the just and the unjust in accordance with natural laws.

Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.

Religion is one of the phases of thought through which the world is passing.

To be like other people is to be unlike ourselves.

For myself, I have but little confidence in any business, or enterprise, or investment, that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders.

One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests.

Strange but true: those who have loved God most have loved men least.

I have one sentiment for soldiers living and dead: cheers for the living; tears for the dead.

I do not believe in loving enemies; I have pretty hard work to love my friends.

Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.

If there is one subject in this world worthy of being discussed, worthy of being understood, it is the question of intellectual liberty. Without that, we are simply painted clay.

The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know.

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

You see, after all, few rich men own their property. The property owns them.

All religion is slavery.

Memory is the miser of the mind; forgetfulness the spendthrift.

The careful reader of the New Testament will find three Christs described: - One who wished to preserve Judaism - one who wished to reform it, and one who built a system of his own

This is my creed: Happiness is the only good; reason the only torch; justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.

I have always noticed that the people who have the smallest souls make the most fuss about getting them saved.

The first step is for man to cease to be the slave of man. The second, is to cease to be the slave of the monsters of his own creation, the ghosts and phantoms of the air.

If the world ever advances beyond what it is today, it must be led by men who express their real opinions.

Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man.

Truth is the mother of joy. Truth civilizes, ennobles and purifies. The grandest ambition that can enter the soul is to know the truth.

As we become civilized we are governed less by persons and more by principles. . . . The best of all leaders is the man who teaches people to lead themselves.

Nothing discloses real character like the use of power.

The Declaration of Independence was a denial, and the first denial of a nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others.

Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!

Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.

Catholicism is contrary to human liberty. Catholicism bases salvation upon belief. Catholicism teaches man to trample his reason under foot. And for that reason it is wrong.

We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know.

No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

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.

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.

There is in all artists a little of the vagabond.

Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars.

I am going to put the Bible out of business.

I found that the clergy did not understand their own book.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart-the best brain.

One thing I do know, and that is, that neither hope, nor fear, belief, nor denial, can change the fact. It is as it is, and it will be as it must be.

If Jehovah cannot support his religion without going into partnership with a State Legislature, I think he ought to give it up.

Honesty is the mother of confidence; it unites, combines and solidifies society. Dishonesty is disintegration; it destroys confidence; it brings social chaos. . . .

Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.

It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.

My principal objections to orthodox religion are two: slavery here and hell hereafter.

Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers.

If nobody has too much, everybody will have enough.

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

No man with a sense of humor ever founded a religion.