The Great Agnostic Quotes

“Ingersoll was introduced as one of the main speakers by Frederick Douglass and proceeded, unlike most leaders of his party, to eviscerate the court’s logic. “This decision takes from seven millions of people the shield of the Constitution,” he said. “It leaves the best of the colored race at the mercy of the meanest of the white. It feeds fat the ancient grudge that vicious ignorance bears toward race and color. It will be approved and quoted by hundreds of thousands of unjust men. The masked wretches who, in the darkness of night, drag the poor negro from his cabin, and lacerate with whip and thong his quivering flesh, will, with bloody hands, applaud the Supreme Court. The men who, by mob violence, prevent the negro from depositing his ballot—those who with gun and revolver drive him from the polls, and those who insult with vile and vulgar words the inoffensive colored girl, will welcome this decision with hyena joy. The basest will rejoice—the noblest will mourn.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“In 1882, Congress passed the first immigration law in the nation’s history—the Chinese Exclusion Act—specifically to bar the entrance of workers from a particular country. The Chinese had, of course, been welcome when there was a labor shortage and “coolies” were needed to build the transcontinental railroad. In 1892, the Exclusion Act was toughened under a law written by California representative Thomas J. Geary (the Geary whose memory is lionized in street names and other monuments throughout San Francisco). Under the Geary law, upheld by a 5–4 Supreme Court vote, all Chinese residents of the United States were required to carry a residence permit. Chinese were forbidden to bear witness in court should they be arrested for not carrying their internal “passport” and were denied”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“What Ingersoll, like Voltaire and Paine before him, understood was the indivisibility of human rights, and he understood this not in spite of but precisely because of his disbelief in a deity who had supposedly “designed” the order of nature.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. The creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“When the Constitution was being written in Philadelphia in 1787, only two decades had passed since the horrifying execution in France of nineteen-year-old Jean-François Lefevre, Chevalier de la Barre, for blasphemy—a case, publicized by Voltaire, that shocked the educated world.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“Broadly speaking, there are two divergent strains of American secular thought. One can be traced to the radical humanism of Tom Paine, who saw the separation of church and state not only as the guarantor of personal freedom of conscience but also as the foundation of a world in which inherited status and wealth would be replaced by merit and intellect as the dominant forces in the lives of individuals. Recognition of a common humanity, not tooth-and-claw competition, would create social progress. The other distinct current of American secularism begins with the social Darwinists of the nineteenth century and continues through the “objectivism” and exaltation of the Übermensch preached by the twentieth-century atheist and unregulated market idolator Ayn Rand. These diverging currents can also be found within the “new atheist” movement today, in which people often make a point of labeling themselves as either secular humanists, who are usually liberals, or skeptics, who are generally libertarian conservatives.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“There are two distinct threads in the history of American secularism—the first descending from the humanism and egalitarianism of Paine and the second from nineteenth-century social Darwinism through the twentieth-century every-man-for-himself “objectivism” of Ayn Rand. A true intellectual descendant of Paine, Ingersoll linked reason and science to the success and survival of democracy, as the Enlightenment deists among the founders did, and contended that the capacity for rational thought existed among all races and social classes.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free the present. We are not forging fetters for our children, but we are breaking those our fathers made for us. We are the advocates of inquiry, of investigation, and thought. This of itself, is an admission that we are not perfectly satisfied with our conclusions. Philosophy has not the egotism of faith.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“But the power of religion-based law”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“… I would rather belong to that race that commenced a skull-less vertebrate and produced Shakespeare”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all; to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“An important piece of evidence against him was his possession of a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique Portatif, an anthology including many articles attacking the Catholic Church.* The young nobleman was sentenced to the customary punishment—being burned—after having his right hand cut off and his tongue cut out; Voltaire’s book was burned along with him. The defendant refused to confess or name any other young men who had participated—even after being tortured for the final hour before his execution (again, as mandated by law), and the sentence was then carried out. The clerics and government magistrates, after cutting off the hand as specified in the sentence, showed unexpected mercy by not cutting out the young nobleman’s tongue before the auto da fé.†”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“The common thread in all of Ingersoll’s thinking about social issues was secular humanism and its emphasis on the promotion of happiness in this world. Humanism distinguished him from the social Darwinist business leaders who shared his low opinion of religion but not his respect for workers and unlettered immigrants. “Secularism teaches us to be good here and now,” he said. “I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“In 1882, Congress passed the first immigration law in the nation’s history—the Chinese Exclusion Act—specifically to bar the entrance of workers from a particular country. The Chinese had, of course, been welcome when there was a labor shortage and “coolies” were needed to build the transcontinental railroad. In 1892, the Exclusion Act was toughened under a law written by California representative Thomas J. Geary (the Geary whose memory is lionized in street names and other monuments throughout San Francisco). Under the Geary law, upheld by a 5–4 Supreme Court vote, all Chinese residents of the United States were required to carry a residence permit. Chinese were forbidden to bear witness in court should they be arrested for not carrying their internal “passport” and were denied bail.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“The most important of these are racial equality, respect for varied ethnic groups, women’s rights, and many disputes that would today fall within the realm of civil liberties. From a secular humanist perspective, Ingersoll was on the right side of nearly all of these issues. From the perspective of the social Darwinist-Randian secularists, Ingersoll was often on the wrong side—as he would be on the wrong side of Rand’s devotees today.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“Now that science has attained its youth,” Ingersoll said, “and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: ‘Let us be friends.’ It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: ‘Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet.’”12”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“From a twenty-first-century perspective, it is clear that the golden age of freethought, which stretched roughly from 1875 until the beginning of the First World War, divided Americans in much the same fashion, and over many of the same issues, as the culture wars of the past three decades.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought