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I read the other day an account of a meeting between John Knox and John Calvin. Imagine a dialogue between a pestilence and a famine!

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
Imagine
Famine
Read
Account
Meeting
Dialogue
Meetings
John
Knox
Accounts
Pestilence
Atheism
Calvin

More quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll

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An infinite personality is an infinite impossibility.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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But honest men do not pretend to know they are candid and sincere they love the truth they admit their ignorance, and they say, We do not know.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Some president wishes to be re-elected, and thereupon speaks about the Bible as the corner-stone of American Liberty. This sentence is a mouth large enough to swallow any church, and from that time forward the religious people will be citing that remark of the politician to substantiate the inspiration of the Scriptures.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow men. We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and friend.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we feel and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are translated into music. Music is the sunshine - the climate - of the soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Commerce is the great civilizer. We exchange ideas when we exchange fabrics.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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If the reason I give is a good one, you will act upon it. If it is a bad one I cannot make it better by piling epithet upon epithet. There is no logic in abuse there is no argument in an epithet.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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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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It is labor that has made the world a fit habitation for the human race.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Good nature is the cheapest commodity in the world.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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I found that the clergy did not understand their own book.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man.
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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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