Quote #122

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 tends to the happiness of mankind. I believe, as much as I believe that I live, that on the average the good man is not only the happier man, but that no man is happy who is not good.

More from Robert G. Ingersoll

  1. 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…
  2. 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…
  3. 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 …
  4. I believe in the fireside. I believe in the democracy of home. I believe in the republicanism of the family. I believe in liberty, equality…
  5. 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 wh…
  6. I believe in the religion of reason - the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth,…
  7. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.
  8. I despise a stingy man. I do not see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty million of dollars, or ten million of dollars, in a ci…

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