Top 400 Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Creationists use facts the same way a drunk uses a lightpost: for support instead of illumination.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

352. “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 G. Ingersoll

353. “Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

354. “To avoid pain we must know the conditions of health. For the accomplishment of this end we must rely upon investigation instead of faith, upon labor in place of prayer. Most misery is produced by ignorance. Passions sow the seeds of pain.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

355. “If priests had not been fond of mutton, lambs never would have been sacrified to god. Nothing was ever carried to the temple that the priest could not use, and it always happened that god wanted what his agents liked.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

356. “I admit that books were voted in and out, and that the Bible was finally formed in accordance with a vote.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

357. “He who commends the brutalities of the past, sows the seeds of future crimes.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

358. “Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

359. “Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man. Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man. Any man who is afraid to have his doctrine investigated is not only a coward but a hypocrite.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

360. “What has religion to do with facts? Nothing.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

361. “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 G. Ingersoll

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

— Robert G. Ingersoll

363. “I believe in the religion of reason – the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

364. “I found that the clergy did not understand their own book.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

365. “Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

366. “If the Bible is true, it needs no inspiration, and – if not true, inspiration can do it no good.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

367. “It is grander to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

368. “Music was born of love. Had there never been any human affection, there never could have been uttered a strain of music.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

369. “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 G. Ingersoll

370. “Men and women desire each other, and this desire is a condition of civilization, progress, and happiness, and of everything of real value. But there is this profound difference in the sexes: in man this desire is the foundation of love, while in woman love is the foundation of this desire.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

371. “When one of your children tells a lie, be honest with him; tell him that you have told hundreds of them yourself. Tell him it is not the best way; that you have tried it. Tell him as the man did in Maine when his boy left home: “John, honesty is the best policy; I have tried both.””

— Robert G. Ingersoll

372. “I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree that they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm off guesses as demonstrated truths.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

373. “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.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

374. “Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin; and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

375. “It is hard to overstate the debt that we owe to men and women of genius.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

376. “When a fact can be demonstrated, force is unnecessary; when it cannot be demonstrated, force is infamous.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

377. “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 G. Ingersoll

378. “Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty, and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

379. “Liberty is the breath of progress.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

380. “In the search for truth – that everything in nature seems to hide – man needs the assistance of all his faculties. All the senses should be awake.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

381. “I would not wish to live in a world where I could not express my honest opinions. Men who deny to others the right of speech are not fit to live with honest men.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

382. “Orthodoxy cannot afford to put out the fires of hell.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

383. “If he was, in fact, God, he knew there was no such thing as death. He knew that what we called death was but the eternal opening of the golden gates of everlasting joy; and it took no heroism to face a death that was eternal life.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

384. “The more liberty you give away the more you will have.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

385. “One dollar at compound interest, at twenty-four per cent., for one hundred years, would produce a sum equal to our national debt. Interest eats night and day, and the more it eats the hungrier it grows. The farmer in debt, lying awake at night, can, if he listens, hear it gnaw. If he owes nothing, he can hear his corn grow. Get out of debt as soon as you possibly can. You have supported idle avarice and lazy economy long enough.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

386. “Sometime, it will be found that people can be changed only by changing their surroundings. It is alleged that, at least ninety-five percent of the criminals transported from England to Australia and other penal colonies, became good and useful citizens in a new world.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

387. “It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

388. “Liberty a word without which all other words are vain.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

389. “Now and then some one says that the religion of his father and mother is good enough for him, and wonders why anybody should desire a better. Surely we are not bound to follow our parents in religion any more than in politics, science or art.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

390. “No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

391. “As long as men did nothing except to render their fellows wretched; as long as they only butchered and burnt the innocent and helpless, God maintained the strictest and most heartless neutrality. But when some honest man, some great and tender soul expressed a doubt as to the truth of the Scriptures, or prayed to the wrong God, or to the right one by the wrong name, then the real God leaped like a wounded tiger upon his victim, and from his quivering flesh tore his wretched soul.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

392. “Is not the history of real civilization the slow and gradual emancipation of the intellect, of the judgment, from the mastery of passion? Is not that man civilized whose reason sits the crowned monarch of his brain – whose passions are his servants?”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

393. “Wait until the world is free before you write a creed. In this creed there will be but one word – Liberty.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

394. “Whoever saw an angel barefooted?”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

395. “Liberty cannot be sacrificed for the sake of anything.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

396. “You cannot be so poor that you cannot help somebody.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

397. “The church teaches us that we can make God happy by being miserable ourselves.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

398. “The man who accepts opinions because they have been entertained by distinguished people, is a mental snob.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

399. “Twenty years after the death of Luther there were more Catholics than when he was born. And twenty years after the death of Voltaire there were millions less than when he was born.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

400. “Is it necessary that Heaven should borrow its light from the glare of Hell? Infinite punishment is infinite cruelty, endless injustice, immortal meanness. To worship an eternal gaoler hardens, debases, and pollutes even the vilest soul. While there is one sad and breaking heart in the universe, no good being can be perfectly happy.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll