Quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"The more liberty you give away the more you will have."

"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."

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

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

"It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law."

"Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery."

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

"What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy."

"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."

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

"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot."

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

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

"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."