Robert Green Ingersoll quotes:

The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.

In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.

A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains, he gives to others.

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.

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.

He who refuses to stoop, who cannot be bribed by the promise of success or the fear of failure - who walks the highway of the right, and in disaster stands erect, is the only victor.

A prayer that must have a cannon behind it better never be uttered. Forgiveness ought not to go in partnership with shot and shell. Love need not carry knives and revolvers.

I concluded that all religions had the same foundation - a belief in the supernatural - a power above nature that man could influence by worship - by sacrifice and prayer.

Suspicion is only another form of cowardice. The man who suspects constantly suspects because he is afraid. Whenever you find a man with a free, frank, generous, brave nature, you will find that man without suspicion.

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

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.

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.

I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.

We need men with moral courage to speak and write their real thoughts, and to stand by their convictions, even to the very death.

When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then - and not until then - will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.

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.

You need not go back four thousand years for heroines. The world is filled with them today. They do not belong to any nation, nor to any religion, nor exclusively to any race. Wherever woman is found, they are found.

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.

Nature is filled with tendencies and obstructions. Extremes beget limitations, even as a river by its own swiftness creates obstructions for itself.

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.

When men are prosperous, they are in love with life. Nature grows beautiful, the arts begin to flourish, there is work for painter and sculptor, the poet is born, the stage is erected - and this life with which men are in love is represented in a thousand forms.

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.

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.

Man never had an idea - man will never have an idea, except those supplied to him by his surroundings. Every idea in the world that man has came to him by nature.

As long as we can get redress in the courts, as long as the laws shall be honestly administered, as long as honesty and intelligence sit upon the bench, as long as intelligence sits in the chairs of jurors, this country will stand, the law will be enforced, and the law will be respected.

Freedom believes in education - the salvation of slavery is ignorance.

As long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power.

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

Character is made of duty and love and sympathy, and, above all, of living and working for others.

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.

Neutrality is generally used as a mask to hide unusual bitterness. Sometimes it hides what it is - nothing. It always stands for hollowness of head or bitterness of heart, sometimes for both.

There is a quiet about the life of a farmer, and the hope of a serene old age, that no other business or profession can promise.

If there is any God, there is only one way to please him, and that is by a conscientious discharge of your obligations to your fellow men.

Taste and love are not the servants of the will. Love is and must be free. It rises from the heart like perfume from a flower.

The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.

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.

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.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne.

A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.

This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries.

In my judgment, the American people are too brave, too charitable, too generous, too magnanimous, to believe in the infamous dogma of an eternal hell.

I say that no man can be greater than the man who bravely and heroically sacrifices his life for the good of others. No man can be greater than the one who meets death face to face, and yet will not shrink from what he believes to be his highest duty.

If the government can make money, what on earth does it collect taxes for you and me for? Why don't it make what money it wants, take the taxes out, and give the balance to us?

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.

We can conceive of eternity because we cannot conceive of a cessation of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest star and see infinite space beyond.

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.

Kings had their clowns, the people their actors and musicians. Shakespeare was scheduled as a servant. It is thus that successful stupidity has always treated genius.

When you go home, fill the house with joy so that the light of it will stream out the windows and doors and illuminate even the darkness. It is just as easy that way as any in the world.

What light is to the eyes - what air is to the lungs - what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.

How poor this world would be without its graves, without the memories of its mighty dead. Only the voiceless speak forever.

Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and depth; that there are no walls nor fences, nor prohibited places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought.

If the guardians of society, the protectors of 'young persons,' could have had their way, we should have known nothing of Byron or Shelley. The voices that thrill the world would now be silent.

Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.

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.

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.

It has been said that a man of genius should select his ancestors with great care - and yet there does not seem to be as much in heredity as most people think. The children of the great are often small.

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.

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.

Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did and never will agree.

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.

A good way to make children tell the truth is to tell it yourself. Keep your word with your child the same as you would with your banker.

There are so many societies, so many churches, so many -isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career.

They who gain applause and power by pandering to the mistakes, the prejudices and passions of the multitude are the enemies of liberty.

Every good government is made up of good families. The unit of good government is the family, and anything that tends to destroy the family is perfectly devilish and infamous.

The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.

The truth is that all great men have had great mothers. Great women have had, as a rule, great fathers.

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.

Happiness is the legal-tender of the soul. Joy is wealth.

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.'

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

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.

Every religion in the world has denounced every other religion as a fraud. That proves to me that they all tell the truth - about others.

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

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.

Perjury is the basest and meanest and most cowardly of crimes. What can it do? Perjury can change the common air that we breathe into the axe of an executioner.

If I owe Smith ten dollars and God forgives me, that doesn't pay Smith.

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

An honest God is the noblest work of man.

Ignorant people are apt to overrate the value of what is called education. The sons of the poor, having suffered the privations of poverty, think of wealth as the mother of joy.

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

The grandest ambition that any man can possibly have is to so live and so improve himself in heart and brain as to be worthy of the love of some splendid woman; and the grandest ambition of any girl is to make herself worthy of the love and adoration of some magnificent man.

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

A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy.

The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.

Voltaire lighted a torch and gave to others the sacred flame. The light still shines and will as long as man loves liberty and seeks for truth.

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.

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

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!

Few rich men own their property; their property owns them.

If you wish to reflect credit upon your parents, accomplish more than they did, solve problems that they could not understand, and build better than they knew.

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

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

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

Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book and creed and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free.

The time to be happy is now, and the place to be happy is here.

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.

The credulity of the church is decreasing, and the most marvelous miracles are not either 'explained,' or allowed to take refuge behind the mistakes of the translators, or hide in the drapery of allegory.

Some president wishes to be re-elected, and thereupon speaks about the Bible as "the corner-stone of American Liberty." This sentence is a mouth large enough to swallow any church, and from that time forward the religious people will be citing that remark of the politician to substantiate the inspiration of the Scriptures.

A mule has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.

In making up my mind as to what Mr. Lincoln really believed, I do not take into consideration the evidence of unnamed persons or the contents of anonymous letters; I take the testimony of those who knew and loved him, of those to whom he opened his heart and to whom he spoke in the freedom of perfect confidence.

If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish - if a little more enlightened, religion would perish.

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, east a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

With soap, baptism is a good thing.

Christianity has such a contemptible opinion of human nature that it does not believe a man can tell the truth unless frightened by a belief in god. No lower opinion of the human race has ever been expressed.

The destroyer of weeds, thistles, and thorns is a benefactor whether he soweth grain or not.

A good deed is the best prayer.

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.

This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves.

Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense.

Every flower about a house certifies to the refinement of somebody. Every vine climbing and blossoming tells of love and joy

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

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.

A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, infamous and hideous-such is the God of the Pentateuch.

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.

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.

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

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