Vol. 11877Lecture
About Farming in Illinois
A warm, practical lecture to the farmers of Illinois on work, home, freedom, and the partnership between honest labor and intelligence.
1833–1899
Robert Green Ingersoll The Great Agnostic
Robert G. Ingersoll What Must We Do to Be Saved? 1882“The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.”
Continue reading
A few works you've started but haven't finished yet. Stored in your browser only.
America's Great Agnostic
A voice for reason in an age of orthodoxy.
Robert Green Ingersoll was the most celebrated orator of the Gilded Age, a lawyer, Civil War colonel, political leader, and America's foremost champion of freethought, reason, and human liberty.
In an era of rigid religious orthodoxy, Ingersoll stood before thousands to proclaim the dignity of the doubter, the beauty of honest inquiry, and the moral imperative of intellectual freedom. He packed the largest halls in America, not with revivals or politics, but with lectures on science, secularism, and the rights of the human mind.
His complete works, collected posthumously in the twelve-volume Dresden Edition, remain among the most passionate defenses of freethought in the English language.
66Years of Life
12Dresden Volumes
177Works Available
1833Born Dresden, NY
From Dresden, New York to Dresden the Edition
Ingersoll packed courts, lecture halls, and political rallies from the Illinois frontier to Washington, D.C., and, in 1878, as far as Ayr, London, and Paris. Every pin on the map is a specific recorded event or work from his life.
Tiles © OpenStreetMap. Rendered with Leaflet.
His Most Celebrated Works
From piercing lectures on religion to passionate defenses of human freedom, a selection of Ingersoll's greatest writings.
Vol. 11874Lecture
Heretics and Heresies
Ingersoll's 1874 lecture on the long war between intellectual freedom and religious orthodoxy — and the heretics who dared stand against it.
Vol. 11869Lecture
Humboldt
Delivered at the Humboldt centennial in 1869 — a tribute to the great naturalist that marked the beginning of Ingersoll's public freethought career.
Vol. 11873Lecture
Individuality
A ringing defense of mental independence — the right and duty of every human being to think, doubt, and speak their own honest mind against custom…
Vol. 11877Lecture
The Ghosts
An examination of how fear of the unseen built the world's religions — and how science, step by step, is banishing those ghosts from the human…
Vol. 11872Lecture
The Gods
Ingersoll's landmark 1872 lecture attacking the gods fashioned by man after his own fears and ambitions — and calling for a morality built on reason…
Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. — Robert G. Ingersoll, Heretics and Heresies (1874)
Connected to the great minds of his age
Ingersoll moved among presidents, poets, scientists, and reformers, a man at the center of American intellectual life.
Abraham Lincoln
1809–1865
Political Hero & Intellectual Inspiration
Mark Twain
1835–1910
Close Friend & Fellow Freethinker
Walt Whitman
1819–1892
Poet & Admirer
Frederick Douglass
1818–1895
Fellow Champion of Human Liberty
Essays & Commentary
Reflections on Ingersoll's ideas, his legacy, and the enduring relevance of freethought.
The Enduring Relevance of Robert Ingersoll
More than a century after his death, the Great Agnostic's arguments for reason, liberty, and human dignity feel not like history but like dispatches from the…
Ingersoll and Lincoln: Two Men of the Frontier Mind
Though they never met, Ingersoll's reverence for Lincoln illuminates both men, two frontier lawyers shaped by self-reliance, skepticism, and a passion for…
Ingersoll and the Scientific Spirit
Long before science communication became a profession, Ingersoll was translating the discoveries of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall into language that could reach…
His Creed
“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.”