Quote #119

How any human being ever has had the impudence to speak against the right to speak, is beyond the power of my imagination. Here is a man who speaks - who exercises a right that he, by his speech, denies. Can liberty go further than that? Is there any toleration possible beyond the liberty to speak against liberty - the real believer in free speech allowing others to speak against the right to speak? Is there any limitation beyond that?

More from Robert G. Ingersoll

  1. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.
  2. Humanity is the grand religion, and no God can put a man in hell in another world, who has made a little heaven in this. God cannot make a …
  3. He who puts chains upon the body of another shackles his own soul.
  4. I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, blown and flared by passio…
  5. Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.
  6. I am now speaking of the phenomena of nature. I believe, as much as I believe that I live, that the reason a thing is right is because it t…
  7. God cannot hate anybody who is capable of loving anybody.
  8. I am simply in favor of intellectual hospitality - that is all. You come to me with a new idea. I invite you into the house. Let us see wha…

All Robert G. Ingersoll quotes