Robert Green Ingersoll

Delaware has not had the best of opportunities. You must remember that it is next to New Jersey, which is quite an obstacle in the path of progress.

We should also do away with the idea that a marriage is a sacrament, and that there is any God who is rendered happy by seeing a husband and wife live together, although the husband gets most of his earthly enjoyment from whipping his wife.

Another good remedy for wife-beating is the abolition of the Catholic Church.

The trouble now is that most of the wife-beating is among the extremely poor, so that the wife by informing against her husband, takes the last crust out of her own mouth.

The objection I have to the whipping-post is that it is a punishment which cannot be inflicted by a gentleman. The person who administers the punishment must, of necessity, be fully as degraded as the person who receives it.

They act as ‘most anybody would, raised in Delaware, in the shadow of the whipping-post and the pillory. We must remember that Delaware was a slave State; that the Bible became extremely dear to the people because it upheld that peculiar …

Christianity, in order to defend itself, puts the brand of infamy on the brow of honesty. Christianity marks with a letter “C,” standing for “convict” every brain that is great enough to discover the frauds.

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

There has never been upon the earth a generation of free men and women. It is not yet time to write a creed.

the good men, the good women, are tired of the whip and lash in the realm of thought. They remember the chain and fagot with a shudder. They are free, and they give liberty to others; whoever claims any right that he is unwilling to accord …

I simply claim that what ideas I have, I have a right to express; and that any man who denies that right to me is an intellectual thief and robber. That is all.

Standing in the presence of the Unknown, all have the same right to think, and all are equally interested in the great questions of origin and destiny. All I claim, all I plead for, is liberty of thought and expression. That is all. I do …

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

The king said that mankind must not work for themselves. The priest said that mankind must not think for themselves. One forged chains for the hands, the other for the soul.

There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence. The history of man is simply the history of slavery, of injustice and brutality, together with the means by which he has, through the dead and desolate years, slowly …

Can there be such a thing as mercy in eternal punishment? And yet this same Deity says to me, “resist not evil; pray for those that despitefully use you; love your enemies, but I will eternally damn mine.” It seems to me that even gods …

If these words had proceeded from the mouth of a demon, if they had been spoken by some enraged and infinitely malicious fiend, I should not have been surprised. But these things are attributed to a God of infinite mercy.

and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven; there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them.”— Deut. Vii.

This is barbarism, no matter whether it came from heaven or from hell, from a God or from a devil, from the golden streets of the New Jerusalem or from the very Sodom of perdition. It is barbarism complete and utter.

Is that the idea we now have of love? If I have a child, no matter how deformed that child may be, and if it dies, nobody can make the loss to me good by bringing a more beautiful child. I want the one I loved and the one I lost.

While the church believes in witchcraft, it is in a greatly modified form. The evil spirits are not as plenty as in former times, and more phenomena are accounted for by natural means. Just to the extent that belief has been lost in …

In my judgment, they were right. To give up witchcraft is to give up, in a great degree at least, the supernatural. To throw away the little ghosts simply prepares the mind of man to give up the great ones.

The great argument made by Cosmas to show that the earth must be flat, was the fact that the Bible stated that when Christ should come the second time, in glory, the whole world should see him. “Now,” said Cosmas, “if the world is round, …

How is it possible for men of ordinary intellect, not only to endorse such ignorant falsehoods, but to malign those who do not?