Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.

Those who have no sense of right, reason or religion, have a natural propensity to make use of their strength to the destruction of such as are weaker than they.

No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims.

It gets so tiring, this strong-picking-on-the-weak stuff. It was the story of my life -literally- and it seemed to be a big part of the outside world too. I was sick of it, sick of guys like these, stupid and bullying.

Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don't give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have - we have all we want. We are evil.

But as well may you, when urging a man up-hill with a heavy load upon his back, and with your lash also upon his back, tell him, that be has nothing to do either with the load or the lash.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.

Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely

Coalitions are but the unjust subjection of one people to another.

Cossacks, I must tell you that you are the butchers of the Russian workers. Will you continue to be so in the future, or will you acknowledge your own wickedness and join the ranks of the oppressed? Up to now you have shown no respect for the poor workers. For one of the Czar's rubles or a glass of wine, you have nailed them living to the cross.

...and for that they were rich,/And robbed the poor; and for that they were strong,/And scourged the weak; and for that they made laws/Which turned the sweat of labor's brow to blood! - /For these their sins the nations cast them out.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.

The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.

For some people, being free means being free to keep their feet on someone else's chest.

The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of OUR weakness; their riches of OUR poverty; their pride of OUR degradation; their splendour of OUR wretchedness; their tyranny of OUR servitude.

There is a cowardly propensity in the human heart that delights in oppressing somebody else, and in the gratification of this base desire we always select a victim that can be outraged with safety.

The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.

Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims

Power wears out those who do not have it.

It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.

It's terrible when the weak are also cruel for then we are defenseless against them.