“The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray.”

“The Cemetary” from Prose-Poems and Selections from the Writings and Sayings of Robert G. Ingersoll (C. P. Farrell, 1884).

from “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child”, 1878.

“Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.”

Artwork by Arthur Szyck, Coronet magazine, 1946

“I am in favor of the taxation of all church property. If that property belongs to God, he is able to pay the tax. If we exempt anything, let us exempt the home of the widow and orphan.“

- Orthodoxy, 1885

(Love and Freedom in a Cabin)

“I would rather go to the forest far away and build me a little cabin - build it myself and daub it with mud, and live there with my wife and family - and…

"And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain. And then I vowed to
grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still."

“[Women] have ceased to be the prisoners of society - the satisfied serfs of husbands or the echoes of priests. They have lacked - not mind - but opportunity.”

Part of Ingersoll’s introduction to Helen H Gardener’s “Men, Women, and Gods, and Other Lectures” (The Truth Seeker Company, 1885).

“Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will, but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

“Words to Live By” aka “Ingersoll’s Creed”. Quotation printed in “The Little Book of Humanism: Universal Lessons on Finding Purpose, Meaning and Joy” (2020, Piatkus) by @andrewcopson.bsky.social and @profaliceroberts.bsky.social