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“I” Quotes On Power |
“The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom--they are the pillars of society.”
“A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.”
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Attorney General of Illinois, Orator, and Humanist
“There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence. The history of man is simply the history of slavery, of injustice and brutality, together with the means by which he has, through the dead and desolate years, slowly and painfully advanced. He has been the sport and prey of priest and king, the food of superstition and cruel might. Crowned force has governed ignorance through fear. Hypocrisy and tyranny - two vultures - have fed upon the liberties of man. From all these there has been, and is, one means of escape - intellectual development. Upon the back of industry has been the whip. Upon the brains have been the fetters of superstition. Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished. Reading, writing, thinking and investigating have all been crimes. Every science has been an outcast. All the altars and all the thrones united to arrest the forward match of the human race. The king said that mankind must not work for themselves. The priest said that mankind must not think for themselves. One forged chains for the hands, the other for the soul. Under this infamous regime the eagle of the human intellect was for ages a slimy serpent of hypocrisy. The human race was imprisoned.”
“By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.”