Robert Green Ingersoll
Robert Green Ingersoll
Robert Green "Bob" Ingersollwas an American lawyer, a Civil War veteran, political leader, and orator of the United States during the Golden Age of Free Thought, noted for his broad range of culture and his defense of agnosticism. He was nicknamed "The Great Agnostic"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionLawyer
Date of Birth11 August 1833
CountryUnited States of America
orthodoxy coffins cradle
Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.
running long abuse
Arguments cannot be answered by personal abuse; there is no logic in slander, and falsehood, in the long run, defeats itself.
children men if-there-is-a-god
If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow men. We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and friend.
family children laughing
One laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still.
get-well health disease
If I had my way I'd make health catching instead of disease.
true-or-false sincerity martyr
Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves.
done priests humans
Darwin has done more to change human thought than all the priests who have existed.
simple thinking joy
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.
children athlete wrecks
There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: "Let us be friends."
illumination drunk support
Creationists use facts the same way a drunk uses a lightpost: for support instead of illumination
heart perfect suffering
They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest ... The dead do not suffer.
way belief opinion
No one can control his own opinion or his own belief. My belief was forced upon me by my surroundings. I am the product of all circumstances that have in any way touched me.
intellectual progress infidel
The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.
kings truth real
The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf - a philosopher or servant, - but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world.