Quotes from Robert Green Ingersoll

Do right, not to deny yourself but because you love yourself and because you love others.

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

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.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

Most people are Democrats because they hate something; most people are Republicans because they love something.

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

There is no slavery but ignorance.

The doctrine of immortality rests upon human affection. We love; therefore, we wish to live.

If matter cannot be destroyed, cannot be annihilated, it could not have been created. The indestructible must be uncreatable.

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

The great man who gives a true transcript of his mind fascinates and instructs. Most writers suppress individuality. They wish to please the public.

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!

Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.

The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.

Blasphemy is what an old dogma screams at a new truth.

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

He who treats his friends and enemies alike, has neither love nor justice.

The whip degrades; a severe father teaches his children to dissemble; their love is pretense, and their obedience a species of self-defense. Fear is the father of lies.

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.

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.

Our fathers knew that the flag was never intended to protect any man who wanted to assail it.

The American people do not like neutrality. They would rather a man were on the wrong side than on neither.

In a world of cruelty, sympathy is a crime, and in a world of lies, truth is blasphemy.