Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes: 13

• 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!

  The Works Of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. Iii

• Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

  Thomas Paine From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'

• I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the world. I attack slavery. I ask for room -- room for the human mind.

  The Ghosts and Other Lectures

• And why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his?

  Some Mistakes of Moses

• Justice is the only worship.Love is the only priest.Ignorance is the only slavery.Happiness is the only good.The time to be happy is now,The place to be happy is here,The way to be happy is to make others so.Wisdom is the science of happiness.

• The glory of science is, that it is freeing the soul -- breaking the mental manacles -- getting the brain out of bondage -- giving courage to thought -- filling the world with mercy, justice, and joy.

  Humboldt From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'

• 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.

  On the Gods and Other Essays

• It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.

• Liberty a word without which all other words are vain.

• Nothing but truth is immortal.

  The Ghosts and Other Lectures

• No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature.

• I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, -- blown and flared by passion's storm, -- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.

• The religionist is a living fossil, embedded in that rock called faith.