671 Quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll

When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death - that is heroism.

Intelligence is the only moral guide.

Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.

The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

He was a worshiper of liberty, a friend of the oppressed. A thousand times I have heard him quote these words: 'For Justice all place a temple, and all season, summer.' He believed that happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest. He added to the sum of human joy; and were every one to whom he did some loving service to bring a blossom to his grave, he would sleep tonight beneath a wilderness of flowers. . . .

Kindness is the sunshine in which virtue grows.

The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.

Commerce makes friends, religion makes enemies; the one enriches, and the other impoverishes; the one thrives best where the truth is told, the other where falsehoods are believed.