When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then - and not until then - will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

We can conceive of eternity because we cannot conceive of a cessation of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest star and see infinite space beyond.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death - that is heroism.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

We need men with moral courage to speak and write their real thoughts, and to stand by their convictions, even to the very death.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

I say that no man can be greater than the man who bravely and heroically sacrifices his life for the good of others. No man can be greater than the one who meets death face to face, and yet will not shrink from what he believes to be his highest duty.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State. Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave and independent man - the man of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force.

- Robert Green Ingersoll