Quotes from Robert Green Ingersoll

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

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.

Whether there is another life or not, if there is any being who gave me this, I shall thank him from the bottom of my heart, because, upon the whole, my life has been a joy.

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.

To the wise man, to the wise nation, the mistakes of the past are the torches of the present.

When struck on one cheek to turn the other, is really joining a conspiracy to secure the triumph of brutality. To agree not to resist evil is to become an accomplice of all injustice.

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.

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.

They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.

The truth is that nearly everybody is right about some things and wrong about most things; and if a man's testimony is not to be taken until he is right on every subject, witnesses will be extremely scarce.

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

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

I simply claim that what ideas I have, I have a right to express; and that any man who denies that right to me is an intellectual thief and robber.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.

Do the best that can be done and then . . . be resigned.

Hope is the consolation of the world.

The good part of Christmas is not always Christian -- it is generally Pagan; that is to say, human, natural.

Nothing is more despicable than to reach fame by crawling, position by cringing.