Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

Every church pretends to have found the exact truth. This is the end of progress. Why pursue that which you have? Why investigate when you know? Every creed is a rock in running water: humanity sweeps by it. Every creed cries to the universe, "Halt!" A creed is the ignorant Past bullying the enlightened Present. The ignorant are not satisfied with what can be demonstrated. Science is too slow for them, and so they invent creeds. They demand completeness. A sublime segment, a grand fragment, are of no value to them. They demand the complete circle... the entire structure.

Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.

If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.

We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

The world is starving for leaders who are not afraid to dismantle the sacred and precious beliefs, which hold us as prisoners of the past.

The thing with Catholicism, the same as all religions, is that it teaches what should be, which seems rather incorrect. This is what should be. Now, if you're taught to live up to a what should be that never existed - only an occult superstition, no proof of this should be - then you can sit on a jury and indict easily, you can cast the first stone, you can burn Adolf Eichmann, like that!

The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.

We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves, and we are applying to the present the habits of the past.

Wizard's Seventh Rule Life is the future, not the past.

Hold fast to the best of the past and move fast to the best of the future.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

Habit creates the appearance of justice; progress has no greater enemy than habit.

All over the world, particularly in the newer nations, young men are coming to power--men who are not bound by the traditions of the past--men who are not blinded by the old fears and hates and rivalries-- young men who can cast off the old slogans and delusions and suspicions.

The idea of a group of elders is that, in past civilizations, they have linked worlds; the other world was also present in this one. There is also the argument that elders have "experience." The problem is that experience teaches fear of change. Experience kills imagination. Experience makes people conservative. What we are facing tomorrow requires the force of imagination, not wisdom from yesterday.

I'm all for prosperity. It's change I object to.

Sir, we must beware of needless innovation, especially when guided by logic.

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.

I am disgusted with innovation, in whatever guise, and with reason, for I have seen very harmful effects of it.

If I have smashed the traditions, it was because I knew no traditions.