Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

The church knows that an educated man is an unbeliever. That is why there is a continual struggle on the part of the clergy to adulterate education with superstition. To maintain their untenable position they must keep the people shackled to a form of mental slavery.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Superstition is an enemy to civil liberty

The main threat to freedom comes from church ministers who depend upon fear and superstitions to gain and to keep power

The more people are exposed to science, the more we will move away from superstition.

All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.

This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

It's extremely unlucky to be superstitious, for no other reason than it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid.

The bulk of mankind, even in those nations which are most celebrated for learning and wisdom, are still carried down the torrents of superstition, and entertain very unworthy apprehensions

We must abandon completely the naive faith that school automatically liberates the mind and serves the cause of human progress; in fact, we know that it may serve any cause. It may serve tyranny as well as truth, war as well as peace, death as well as life

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches

Almost all the calamities of man, except the physical evils which are inherent in his nature, are in a great measure to be imputed to erroneous views of religion, or bad systems of government; and these cannot be coexistent for any considerable time with an extensive diffusion of knowledge

Never wage war on religion, nor upon seemingly holy institutions, for this thing has too great a force upon the minds of fools.

I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who do fear him.

A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge, for if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power

When man seized the loadstone of science, the loadstar of superstition vanished in the clouds.

Our country would be considered to have gained independence only when the villagers are completely rid of god, religion, castes, and blind beliefs.

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

The great religions are … tragically sources of ceaseless and unnecessary suffering. They are impediments to the grasp of reality needed to solve most social problems in the real world. Their exquisitely human flaw is tribalism.

Religion was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were taught in all the other classes.

I had hoped that out of so many stories you would at least have produced one or two, which could hardly be questioned, and which would clearly show that ghosts or spectres exist. The case you relate... seems to me laughable. In like manner it would be tedious here to examine all the stories of people, who have written on these trifles. To be brief, I cite the instance of Julius Caesar, who, as Suetonius testifies, laughed at such things and yet was happy. ...And so should all who reflect on the human imagination, and the effects of the emotions, laugh at such notions

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.

Superstitious." What a strange word. If you believed in Christianity or Islam, it was called "faith". But if you believed in astrology or Friday the thirteenth it was superstition! Who had the right to call other people's belief superstition?