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The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.

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
Depends
Religion
Often
Superstition
Truth
Advancement
Men
Superstitions
Exchange
Atheism
Intellectual

More quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll

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A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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When passions and appetites are stronger than the intellect, men are savages when the intellect governs the passions, when the passions are servants, men are civilized. The people need education - facts - philosophy.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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When a fact can be demonstrated, force is unnecessary when it cannot be demonstrated, force is infamous.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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As we become civilized we are governed less by persons and more by principles. . . . The best of all leaders is the man who teaches people to lead themselves.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Liberty cannot be sacrificed for the sake of temperance, for the sake of morality, or for the sake of anything. It is of more value than everything. Yet some people would destroy the sun to prevent the growth of weeds. Liberty sustains the same relation to all the virtues that the sun does to life.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Everyone should be taught the nobility of labor, the heroism and splendor of honest effort. As long as it is considered disgraceful to labor, or aristocratic not to labor, the world will be filled with idleness and crime, and with every possible moral deformity.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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We are all children of the same mother, and the same fate awaits us all. We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living-Hope for the dead.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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The minister asks, 'What right have you to hope? It is sacrilegious to you.' But, whether the clergy like it or not, I shall always express my real opinion, and shall always be glad to say to those who mourn: 'There is in death, as I believe, nothing worse than sleep. Hope for as much better as you can.'
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Even in the business of corporations honesty is the best policy, and the companies that have acted in accordance with the highest standard, other things being equal, have reaped the richest harvest.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe when the loving, the tender, east a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Strange but true: those who have loved God most have loved men least.
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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Abraham Lincoln was, in my judgment, in many respects, the grandest man ever President of the United States. Upon his monument these words should be written: Here sleeps the only man in the history of the world who, having been clothed with almost absolute power, never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Ignorance is the worst form of slavery. (Paraphrased)
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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If this religion is true, then there is only one Savior, only one narrow path to life. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other religion.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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The few took advantage of the ignorant many. They pretended to have received messages from the Unknown. They stood between the helpless multitude and the gods. They were the carriers of flags of truce. At the court of heaven they presented the cause of man, and upon the labor of the deceived they lived.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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The old lady who said there must be a devil, else how could they make pictures that looked exactly like him, reasoned like a trained theologian - like a doctor of divinity.
Robert Green Ingersoll