Top 175 Quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll

The truth is that all great men have had great mothers. Great women have had, as a rule, great fathers.

What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy.

Shakespeare pursued the highway of the right. He did not seek to put his characters in a position where it was right to do wrong.

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

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue - or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes.

Taste and love are not the servants of the will. Love is and must be free. It rises from the heart like perfume from a flower.

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.

They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.

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