Quote #123

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 what you have. Let us talk it over. If I do not like your thought, I will bid it a polite 'good day.' If I do like it, I will say: 'Sit down; stay with me, and become a part of the intellectual wealth of my world.' That is all.

More from Robert G. Ingersoll

  1. 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…
  2. 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…
  3. 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…
  4. I believe in the religion of reason - the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth,…
  5. 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 …
  6. 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…
  7. 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…
  8. I do not believe in the government of the lash. If any one of you ever expects to whip your children again, I want you to have a photograph…

All Robert G. Ingersoll quotes