| Robert Green Ingersoll Quotations: BIRTH CONTROL: "All children should be children of love. All that are born should be sincerely welcomed." CHILD ABUSE: "I tell you children have the same rights that we have, and we ought to treat them as though they were human beings. They should be reared with love and kindness, with tenderness, and not with brutality." "The whip degrades; a severe father teachers his children to dissemble; their love is pretense, and their obedience a species of self-defense. Fear is the father of lies." CIVIL RIGHTS: "Virtue is of no color; kindness, justice and love of no complexion." "…and we must neither stop, nor pause, until the Constitution shall become a perfect shield for every right, of every human being, beneath our flag" CREATION: When asked, "Col., if you had been in charge of creation what would you have done differently?" He replied, "Well, first of all, I would have made good health "catching" instead of disease." FAMILY: "The real temple is the home; civilization rests upon the family" HAPPINESS: "The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to try to make others so." HUMANISM: When asked "Will the religion of humanity be the religion of the future?" Ingersoll replied, "Yes; it is the only religion now. All other is superstition. Humanity is the only possible religion." MEANING OF LIFE: "Is life worth living? Well, I can only answer for myself. I like to be alive, to breathe the air, to look at the landscape, the clouds, the stars, to repeat old poems, to look at pictures and statutes, to hear music, the voices of the ones I love. I enjoy eating and smoking. I like good cold water I like to talk to my wife, my girls, my grandchildren. I like to sleep and to dream. Yes, you can say that life, to me, is worth living." RELIGION: "Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, and the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains … religion has not civilized man--man has civilized religion." SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: "Governors and Presidents should not issue religious proclamations. They should not call upon the people to thank God. It is no part of their official duty. It is outside and beyond the horizon of their authority There is nothing in the constitution to justify this religious impertinence." "The truth is our government is not founded upon the rights of gods but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed not to declare the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people for the people. It is the only nation in which the gods have had nothing to do" WAR: "War destroys. Peace creates. War is decay and death. Peace is growth and life--sunlight and air., War kills men. Peace maintains them. Artillery does not reason; it asserts. A bayonet has point enough , but no logic. When the sword is drawn, reason remains in the scabbard."
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From 1880 to his death in 1899, Robert Green Ingersoll probably spoke to more Americans in person than anyone before or since. There are 83 recorded speeches made by Ingersoll in Indiana including his "A Vision of War" speech which is considered second only to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in the ranks of Civil War prose. He spoke out against the majority and the conventional ideas of his day on a wide variety of subjects including civil rights, birth control, and women's rights. His largest audiences turned out to hear him denounce the Bible and religion. He sought to substitute the superiority of science and technology for superstition and blind faith. 
