Quotes from Robert Green Ingersoll

There may be another life, and if there is, the best way to prepare for it is by making somebody happy in this.

The mind cannot be securely anchored. If we do not advance, we go backward. If we do not grow, we decay. If we do not develop, we shrink and shrivel.

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.

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?

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.

Only those who live on the labor of the ignorant are the enemies of science. Real love and real religion are in no danger from science. The more we know the safer all good things are.

Fear is religion, courage is science.

We rise by lifting others.

The record of a generous life runs like a vine around the memory of our dead, and every sweet unselfish act is now a perfumed flower.

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.

Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to protect the rights of man, I am a rebel. Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to give man liberty, to clothe him in all his just rights, I am on the side of that rebellion.

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.

Custom is a prison, locked and barred by those who long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the keeping of the dead.

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

In every age in which books have been produced, the governing class, the respectable, have been opposed to the works of real genius.

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.

George Eliot tenderly carried in her heart the burdens of our race. She looked through pity's tears upon the faults and frailties of mankind.

Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers.

He (Thomas Paine) saw oppression on every hand; injustice everywhere; hypocrisy at the altar; venality on the bench, tyranny on the throne; and with a splendid courage he espoused the cause of the weak against the strong

In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.

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

The only thing that makes life endurable in this world is human love, and yet, according to Christianity, that is the very thing that we are not to have in the other world. We are to be so taken up with Jesus and angels, that we shall care nothing about our brothers and sisters that have been damned. We shall be so carried away with the music of the harp that we shall not even hear the wail of father and mother. Such a religion is a disgrace to human nature.

Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope

What has religion to do with facts? Nothing