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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.

Robert Green Ingersoll

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Robert Green Ingersoll
Age: 65 †
Born: 1833
Born: August 11
Died: 1899
Died: July 21
Essayist
Lawyer
Lecturer
Orator
Philosopher
Politician
Writer
Dresden
Yates County
New York
Robert Ingersoll
The Great Agnostic
Mind
Doctrine
Men
Minds
Crime
Enslave
Hold
Doctrines
Dangerous
Accord
Liberty
Creeds
Doubt
Thrive
Thought
Attack

More quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll

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Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn it ploughs no land it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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In all ages the people have honored those who dishonored them. They have worshiped their destroyers they have canonized the most gigantic liars, and buried the great thieves in marble and gold. Under the loftiest monuments sleeps the dust of murder.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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He loves his country best who strives to make it best.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Truth is the mother of joy. Truth civilizes, ennobles and purifies. The grandest ambition that can enter the soul is to know the truth.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Too much doubt is better than too much credulity.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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The ministers, who preached at these revivals, were in earnest. They were zealous and sincere. They were not philosophers. To them science was the name of a vague dread - a dangerous enemy. They did not know much, but they believed a great deal.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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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.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Now the struggle for life is so sharp, competition is so severe, that few men can succeed who carry a useless burden. The businessmen of our country are compelled to lead temperate lives, otherwise their credit is gone.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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If, with all the time at my disposal, with all the wealth of the resources of this vast universe, to do with as I will, I could not produce a better scheme of life than now prevails, I would be ashamed of my efforts and consider my work a humiliating failure.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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I am simply in favor of intellectual hospitality-that is all. You come to me with a new idea. I invite you into the house. Let us see what you have. Let us talk it over. If I do not like your thought, I will bid it a polite good day. If I do like it, I will say: Sit down stay with me, and become a part of the intellectual wealth of my world.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Ignorance worships mystery reason explains it the one grovels, the other soars.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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The man who accepts opinions because they have been entertained by distinguished people, is a mental snob.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: Let us be friends.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Fear paints pictures of ghosts and hangs them in the gallery of ignorance.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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The man who invented the telescope found out more about heaven than the closed eyes of prayer ever discovered.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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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
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Nothing is greater than to break the chains from the bodies of men, nothing nobler than to destroy the phantom of the soul.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Just to the extent that the Bible was appealed to in matters of science, science was retarded and just to the extent that science has been appealed to in matters of religion, religion has advanced - so that now the object of intelligent religionists is to adopt a creed that will bear the test and criticism of science.
Robert Green Ingersoll