Robert Green Ingersoll

“The mind cannot be securely anchored. If we do not advance, we go backward. If we do not grow, we decay. If we do not develop, we shrink and shrivel.”

“The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.”

“Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.”

“Our fathers knew that the flag was never intended to protect any man who wanted to assail it.”

“A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy.”

“If matter cannot be destroyed, cannot be annihilated, it could not have been created. The indestructible must be uncreatable.”

“Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight.”

“In the grave should be buried the prejudices and passions born of conflict. Charity should hold the scales in which are weighed the deeds of men.”

“Every man should be the intellectual proprietor of himself, honest with himself, and intellectually hospitable; and upon every brain, reason should be enthroned as king.”

“The American people do not like neutrality. They would rather a man were on the wrong side than on neither.”

“Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did and never will agree.”

“Voltaire, as full of life as summer is full of blossoms, giving his ideas upon all subjects at the expense of prince and king, was exiled to England.”

“The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.”

“Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.”

“Kings had their clowns, the people their actors and musicians. Shakespeare was scheduled as a servant. It is thus that successful stupidity has always treated genius.”

“All the punishment in the world will not reform a man, unless he knows that he who inflicts it upon him does it for the sake of reformation, and really and truly loves him, and has his good at heart. Punishment inflicted for gratifying the appetite makes man afraid but debases him.”

“Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State. Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave and independent man - the man of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force.”

“Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.”

“Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to protect the rights of man, I am a rebel. Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to give man liberty, to clothe him in all his just rights, I am on the side of that rebellion.”

“Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government - the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more.”