Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.

The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights.

Surely, nothing can be more dangerous than the doctrine that the moral obligations of men change with the latitude and longitude of a place.

If "Thou shalt not covet," and "Thou shalt not steal," were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

Those who live not by law would be justified by Custom: but, as common practice is the worst teacher that ever was, so the truth and goodness of things is not to be estimated by the entertainment and acceptance they find in the world.

I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.

It is generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world.

The society of women is the element of good manners.

Notions of Good and Evil depend entirely on social context. It is not that people are good or bad, they are raised in an aberrant or twisted environment.

Its [the anthropological method] power to make us understand the roots from which our civilization has sprung, that it impresses us with the relative value of all forms of culture, and thus serves as a check to an exaggerated valuation of the standpoint of our own period, which we are only too liable to consider the ultimate goal of human evolution, thus depriving ourselves of the benefits to be gained from the teachings of other cultures and hindering an objective criticism of our own work.

It is a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization-is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.