Robert Green Ingersoll

"Courage without conscience is a wild beast."

"Every religion in the world has denounced every other religion as a fraud. That proves to me that they all tell the truth - about others."

"Freedom believes in education - the salvation of slavery is ignorance."

"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot."

"I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not."

"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences."

"In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing."

"It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had the individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions."

"It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense."

"Most people can bear adversity; but if you wish to know what a man really is give him power."

"Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science."

"Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery."

"So far as I am concerned, I think more of reasons than of reputations, more of principles than of persons, more of nature than of names, more of facts than of faiths."

"The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart."

"The man who has really won the love of one good woman in this world, I do not care if he dies in the ditch a beggar - his life has been a success."

"The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others."

"The truth is that all great men have had great mothers. Great women have had, as a rule, great fathers."

"They who gain applause and power by pandering to the mistakes, the prejudices and passions of the multitude are the enemies of liberty."

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

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