Quotes from Robert Green Ingersoll

It is with men as with other things. The mullein needs only a year, but the oak a century, and the greatest men are those who have continued to grow as long as they have lived.

A miracle is the badge and brand of fraud. ... No intelligent, honest man ever pretended to perform a miracle, and never will.

Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power.

The history of the world shows that when a mean thing was done, man did it; when a good thing was done, man did it.

God cannot send to eternal pain a man who has done something toward improving the condition of his fellow-man. If he can, I had rather go to hell than to heaven and keep company with such a god.

Every sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed his will to man. To each reader the Bible conveys a different meaning.

If we should put god in the Constitution there would be no room left for man.

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.

At thirty most men have prejudices rather than opinions-that is to say, rather than judgments-and few men have lived to be sixty without materially modifying the opinions they held at thirty.

Nothing is greater than to break the chains from the bodies of men, nothing nobler than to destroy the phantom of the soul.

The greatest superstition now entertained by public men is that hypocrisy is the royal road to success.

We must remember that we have to make judges out of men, and that by being made judges their prejudices are not diminished and their intelligence is not increased.

Civilization has gotten further and further from the so-called 'natural' man, who uses all his faculties: perception, invention, improvisation.

No God can put a man in hell in another world, who has made a little heaven in this. God cannot make a man miserable if that man has made somebody else happy.

If the money is raised by taxation, then the burden will fall where it ought to fall, . . . and the rich and stingy will no longer be able to evade the duties of citizenship and of humanity.

The first duty of man is to support himself - to see to it that he does not become a burden. His next duty is to help others if he has a surplus, and if he really believes they deserve to be helped.

We are all children of the same mother, and the same fate awaits us all. We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living-Hope for the dead.

The Church says the Earth is flat. But I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the Moon. And I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.

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.

If we are immortal, it is a fact of nature, and that fact does not depend on bibles, on Christs, priest, or creeds.

If we are immortal it is a fact in nature, and we are not indebted to priests for it, nor to bibles for it, and it cannot be destroyed by unbelief.

The triumph of justice is the only peace.

This, in my judgment, is the highest philosophy: First, do not regret having lost yesterday; second, do not fear that you will lose tomorrow; third, enjoy today.

Nothing could be more dangerous to the existence of this Republic than to introduce religion into politics