A Quote a Day
A Year of Ingersoll
Three hundred and sixty-five days, three hundred and sixty-five lines. Every one is lifted word for word from a work in this archive, and every one links back to the paragraph it came from, so you can read what surrounds it.
Today
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The feed is an ordinary iCalendar file. Each day is a single all-day entry that repeats every year, so it never expires and I never have to regenerate it. Nothing is tracked — the file is served as a static asset like every other page here.
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February 29
The calendar runs 365 days. A yearly repeat anchored on February 29 behaves differently in every app I tried — some fire it three years in four, some quietly move it to March 1 — so leap years have one quiet day instead of one wrong one.
Where the quotes come from
Every line is verbatim from a work in this archive. Nothing is paraphrased, modernized, joined together or tidied up; the only change from the source file is that its typesetter’s line breaks become ordinary spaces. Passages he was quoting in order to argue against them — scripture, opponents, reported speech — are excluded, as are the volumes of debates and discussions, because those files carry the other man’s prose alongside his. The full selection rules are in docs/daily-quote-criteria.md, and the whole set is a single reviewable file in the repository.
If a quotation here does not match the printed Dresden text, tell me and I will fix it. Corrections are logged at /errata/.
For machines
The same 365 records are available as JSON, alongside the rest of the archive’s machine-readable surfaces.
The whole year
Every day links to its own page, with the quote, its source, and a way to share it.
January
- 1A man who slanders a pure woman or an honest man is a blasphemer. So, too, a man who does not give the honest transcript of his mind is a blasphemer.
- 2Great wealth is a great burden, and to have more than you can use, is to care for more than you want.
- 3Liberty is the blossom and fruit of justice—the perfume of mercy. Liberty is the seed and soil, the air and light, the dew and rain of progress, love and joy.
- 4For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.
- 5Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart—the best brain.
- 6I insist that happiness is the end—virtue the means—and anything that wipes a tear from the face of man is good.
- 7Freedom is progress—slavery is desolation, cruelty and want.
- 8The prudent is not the poetic; it is the mathematical. Genius is the spirit of abandon; it is joyous, irresponsible.
- 9We cannot tell, we do not know, which is the greater blessing—life or death. We cannot say that death is not a good.
- 10The religion that has to be supported by law is without value, not only, but a fraud and curse.
- 11The lash will neither develop the brain nor cultivate the heart.
- 12Every creed in which is the dogma of eternal pain is doomed.
- 13Nothing is more touching than the death of the young, the strong.
- 14The flag for which the heroes fought, for which they died, is the symbol of all we are, of all we hope to be.
- 15The working people are reasoners—their hands and heads are in partnership. They know a great deal more than the capitalists.
- 16If the very fountain of power is poisoned by fraud, then the whole Government is impure.
- 17The coffin is good enough in its way, but the cradle is far better. With the bones of the fathers they beat out the brains of the children.
- 18Fear is barbarism—courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion—courage is science.
- 19There have been, and still are, too many men who own themselves—too much thought, too much knowledge for the church to grasp again the sword of power.
- 20Liberty is the breath of progress; it is the seed and soil, the heat and rain of love and joy.
- 21Abject faith is barbarism; reason is civilization. To obey is slavish; to act from a sense of obligation perceived by the reason, is noble.
- 22No matter how small the taper is, how feeble the ray of light it casts, it is better than darkness, and no man should be rewarded for extinguishing the light he has.
- 23The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men.
- 24The more a man has thought, the more he has studied, the more he has traveled intellectually, the less certain he is.
- 25Surely investigation is better than unthinking faith. Surely reason is a better guide than fear.
- 26Death gets all its terror from Love, and Love gets its intensity, its radiance, its glory and its rapture, from the darkness of Death.
- 27Life is not all sunshine, neither is it all storm, but man should be enabled to enjoy the one and to withstand the other.
- 28In nearly every department of science man is allowed to investigate, and the discovery of a new fact is welcomed, unless it threatens some creed.
- 29Science insists that the present is the child of all the past,—that no power can change the past, and that nature is forever the same.
- 30Every fact is an enemy of the church. Every fact is a heretic. Every demonstration is an infidel.
- 31The intelligent prefer death to slavery. Education is the most radical abolitionist in the world. To teach the alphabet is to inaugurate revolution.
February
- 1In a moment the seed is a plant, and the plant is in blossom, and the fruit is given to the world.
- 2Men when they commit crimes endeavor to get away from the public eye. They are in love with darkness. They do not carry torches in front of them.
- 3As a rule, the attention of man is drawn first, not to his own mistakes, not to his own faults, but to the mistakes and faults of his neighbors.
- 4Love is the many-colored flame that makes the fireside of the heart. It is the mingled spring and autumn—the perfect climate of the soul.
- 5The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church. Wherever the Bible and sword are in partnership, man is a slave.
- 6The spiritually-minded man is a poet. If he does not write poetry, he lives it. He is an artist.
- 7The foundation of superstition is ignorance, the superstructure is faith and the dome is a vain hope.
- 8Better to be stolen from than to be a thief, and in the last analysis the oppressed, the slave, is less unfortunate than the oppressor, the master.
- 9If the angels of the Bible are real angels, the devils are real devils.
- 10Truth is more important than belief—far better than creeds, vastly more useful than superstitions.
- 11If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them.
- 12Theology is not intended to be understood,—it is only to be believed. It is an act, not of reason, but of faith.
- 13The world must learn that credulity is not a virtue and that no question is settled until reason is fully satisfied.
- 14The mendacity of superstition is almost enough to make a man believe in the supernatural.
- 15Superstition is a terrible serpent, reaching in frightful coils from heaven to earth and thrusting its poisoned fangs into the hearts of men.
- 16What light is to the eyes, what love is to the heart, Liberty is to the soul of man.
- 17If there be another world in which sincerity is a virtue, in which fidelity is loved and courage honored, then all is well with the dear friend whom we have lost.
- 18Immortality is a word that Hope through all the ages has been whispering to Love.
- 19Nothing is more despicable than to reach fame by crawling,—position by cringing.
- 20The mind of man is many-sided. Truth must be and is willing to be tested in every way, tested by all the senses.
- 21To be vanquished by the truth is to be a victor. The man who follows is a slave. The man who thinks is free.
- 22The civilized man loves a woman not only for his own sake, but for her sake. He longs to make her happy—to fill her life with joy.
- 23There is only one good, and that is human happiness; and he only is a wise man who makes himself and others happy.
- 24No Devil, no fall of man. No Devil, no atonement. No Devil, no hell.
- 25I thank the poets of the dawn—the tellers of legends—the makers of myths—the singers of joy and grief, of hope and love.
- 26The world advances by the assistance of all laborers; and all labor is under obligations to the inventions of genius.
- 27No man is more certain than the man who knows nothing. The savage knows everything.
- 28The free man, into whose brain the serpent of superstition has not crept, knows that the dogma of eternal pain is an infinite falsehood.
March
- 1The honest man pays at the command of his honor and not at the demand of the creditor.
- 2The whipping-post pollutes, not only the whipped, but the whipper, and not only the whipper, but the community at large.
- 3A fool friend is always full of a kind of stupid candor.
- 4No human being has brain enough, or knowledge enough, or experience enough, to say whether there is, or is not, a God.
- 5In discussion there is no place for hatred, no opportunity for slander. A personality is always out of place.
- 6The brain is natural. Its food is natural. The result—thought—must be natural.
- 7There should be no delay except that which is caused by taking the time to find the truth.
- 8There is only one way, in my judgment, to bring that about; and that is, first, not simply by the education of the head, but by the universal education of the heart.
- 9I believe that the common school is the bread of life, and all should be commanded to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
- 10The cruelty of the flood is exceeded only by its stupidity.
- 11In the orthodox heaven there is no mercy, no pity. In the orthodox hell there is no hope, no reform. God is an eternal jailer, an everlasting turnkey.
- 12Guilt is always conscious that it is guilty. Guilt is always suspecting detection. Guilt is infinitely suspicious.
- 13The useful man is the good man, the useful man is the real saint.
- 14The time is coming when no man will be called an honest man who is not willing to give to every other man, be he white or black, every right that he asks for himself.
- 15All the meanness of which the heart of man is capable is in that one word—Hell.
- 16There are good people and bad people in all races, and the individual is not responsible for the crimes of the nation, or the nation responsible for the actions of the few.
- 17In every direction the thinker and the investigator have ventured and explored, and even the pews have begun to ask questions of the pulpits.
- 18The world is better for your life—The world is braver for your death.
- 19The record of a generous life runs like a vine around the memory of our dead, and every sweet, unselfish act is now a perfumed flower.
- 20Sincerity is the true and perfect mirror of the mind. It reflects the honest thought. It is the foundation of character, and without it there is no moral grandeur.
- 21The babes that are then born will be welcome. They will be clasped with glad hands to happy breasts. They will fill homes with light and joy.
- 22Fear is the dungeon of the mind, and superstition is a dagger with which hypocrisy assassinates the soul. Courage is liberty.
- 23The light still shines and will as long as man loves liberty and seeks for truth.
- 24Nothing is more needed at the present time than an inspired translator.
- 25The individual is counting for less and less; the corporation, the trust, for more and more.
- 26I am a believer in intellectual liberty, and wherever the torch of knowledge burns the whole horizon is filled with a glorious halo. I am a free man.
- 27A rich spendthrift is a blessing. A rich miser is a curse. Extravagance is a splendid form of charity.
- 28Leave religion with the church, with the family, and more than all, leave religion with each individual heart and man.
- 29There is something magnificent after all about the extravagance of youth, and there is something pitiful about the greed of old age.
- 30Liberty is the condition of real progress. The free man works for wife and child—the slave toils from fear.
- 31At last, nations are becoming acquainted with each other, and they now know that people everywhere are substantially the same.
April
- 1The love of the beautiful is shared with man by most animals. The wings of the moth are painted by love, by desire.
- 2The great picture should have, not only the technical part of art, which is neither moral nor immoral, but in addition some great thought, some great event.
- 3There is something wrong when men are obliged to beg for leave to toil.
- 4Everything that is possible happens. That may not suit all the creeds, but it is true. And everything that is possible will continue to happen.
- 5I tell you there is no more sacred, no more holy, and no purer thing than what you and I call sympathy; and the man who is unsympathetic is not a man.
- 6The Press presents the daily thoughts of men. It marks the progress of each hour, and renders a relapse into ignorance and barbarism impossible.
- 7I want to keep the roof over the heads of children when the man himself is gone. I want that homestead to belong not only to the man, but to wife and children.
- 8If there is anything of value, it is liberty—liberty of body, liberty of mind. The liberty of body is the reward of labor.
- 9The gloomy caverns of superstition have been transformed into temples of thought, and the demons of the past are the angels of to-day.
- 10Loving words sow seeds of love in every gentle heart. Appreciation is the soil and climate of good and generous deeds.
- 11When the angel of pity is driven from the heart; when the fountain of tears is dry,—the soul becomes a serpent crawling in the dust of a desert.
- 12Nothing ennobles a man so much as fighting for the right.
- 13I would like to see the whole world free—free from injustice—free from superstition.
- 14Infidelity stands by facts; it demonstrates by the conclusions of the reason. Infidelity does all it can to develop the brain and the heart of man.
- 15The English battered down the door in the names of opium and Christ.
- 16Peace without liberty could have been only a bloody delusion and a snare. Freedom is peace; Slavery is war.
- 17We know that no man is thoroughly honest who does not tell his honest thought.
- 18All greatness is merciful. All greatness longs to forgive. All true grandeur and nobility is capable of shedding the divine tear of pity.
- 19The man who thought, and expressed his thoughts, died in a dungeon—on the scaffold or in flames.
- 20By spiritual I mean a man that has an ideal, a great ideal, and who is splendid enough to live to that ideal; that is what I mean by spiritual.
- 21Ignorance is a poor doctor, even for the poor, and if we pretend to be charitable we ought to carry it out.
- 22If a man simply shouts for his side, or gets mad, he is a long way from any intellectual improvement.
- 23Every man who has caused real, true, honest mirth, has been a benefactor of the human race.
- 24The young, the growing, the enthusiastic, are on my side.
- 25The Improved Man will not give his life to the accumulation of wealth. He will find no happiness in exciting the envy of his neighbors.
- 26In the presence of the Great Mystery, the great mystery that waits to enshroud us all, we feel the uselessness of words.
- 27A noble life is never lost. A virtuous action does not die.
- 28To the average man the Christian hell and heaven are only words.
- 29A braver, a more serene, a more chivalric spirit—clasping the loved and by them clasped—never passed from life to enrich the realm of death.
- 30In the drama of human life, all are actors, and no one knows his part.
May
- 1No one could fall below her pity, no one could wander beyond the circumference of her sympathy.
- 2New friends can never fill the places of the old.
- 3The imagination of man has the horizon of experience; and beyond experience or nature man cannot go, even in imagination. Man is not a creator.
- 4A black man in favor of liberty is better than a white man in favor of slavery.
- 5Men are beginning to express their honest thoughts. In the arena where speech is free, superstition is driven to the wall.
- 6The man who is fitted to take care of himself, in the conditions he may be placed, is, in a very important sense, an educated man.
- 7There are verses that elevate, verses that degrade. There are prayers for forgiveness and revenge.
- 8The present moment is the child, and the necessary child, of all the past.
- 9Superiority is born of honesty, of virtue, of charity, and above all, of the love of liberty. The superior man is the providence of the inferior.
- 10The imagination is the mother of pity, the mother of generosity, the mother of every possible virtue.
- 11The grand people are marching forward, and they will not pause until the earth is without a chain, and without a throne.
- 12Every brain is a gallery of art, and every soul is, to a greater or less degree, an artist.
- 13We are all children of the same mother, and the same fate awaits us all.
- 14The history of civilization is the history of the slow and painful enfranchisement of the human race.
- 15Let us develop the brain by education, the heart by kindness.
- 16The doctrine of hell is now only for the poor, the ragged, the ignorant.
- 17The flare and flicker of youth are gone, and the soul is like the flame of a lamp where the air is at rest.
- 18There is no language to express the debt we owe, the love we bear, to all the dead who died for us. Words are but barren sounds.
- 19For a man to get up before daylight and work till after dark, life is of no particular importance.
- 20The flag that will not protect its protectors and defend its defenders is a rag that is not worth the air in which it waves.
- 21In language, words of joy are born of light—that which shines—words of grief of darkness and gloom.
- 22The affections of the human heart are worth more than all the myths of all the religions.
- 23Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought.
- 24All there is of value in the world is the product of labor. The laboring man pays all the expenses.
- 25The world is beginning to change because the people are beginning to think. To think is to advance.
- 26Certainly the religion of humanity is better than the religion of the inhuman.
- 27There can be nothing more utterly subversive of all that is really valuable than the suppression of honest thought.
- 28Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine.
- 29The truth is, we are both good and bad. The worst are capable of some good deeds, and the best are capable of bad.
- 30The night, in the purple hum of the bass, wanders away like some enormous bee across wide fields of dead clover.
- 31We need the open air—we need the experience of heat and cold. We need not only the rewards and caresses, but the discipline of our mother Nature.
June
- 1If we are responsible for our thoughts, we ought not only to know how they are formed, but we ought to form them.
- 2There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood—between poetry and perjury.
- 3The brain of the world is not yet developed. There are intellectual diseases as well as physical—there are pestilences and plagues of the mind.
- 4Every library is an arsenal, and every truth is a monitor, iron-clad and steel-plated.
- 5The pioneers—the home builders, the heroes of toil, are all poets, and their deeds are filled with the pathos and perfection of the highest art.
- 6The worst lie in the world is a lie which is partly true.
- 7There is in the life of the individual, as in the life of the race, a period of credulity, when not only appearances are accepted without question, but the declarations of others.
- 8Wit is a crystallization, humor an efflorescence. Wit comes from the brain, humor from the heart. Wit is the lightning of the soul.
- 9Love and Virtue are the same the whole world round, and Justice is the same in every star.
- 10Spirituality is the perfect health of the soul. It is noble, manly, generous, brave, free-spoken, natural, superb.
- 11We know that good is not evil, and that evil is not good. We know that light is not darkness, and that darkness is not light.
- 12The citizens of the real world gain joy and comfort from the stage.
- 13If devils do not exist the fall of man is a mistake and the atonement an absurdity. If devils do not exist hell becomes only a dream of revenge.
- 14In all the sacred books there are some truths, some rays of light, some words of love and hope.
- 15The real priest will then be, not the mouth-piece of some pretended deity, but the interpreter of nature.
- 16The great effort of the human mind is to ascertain the order of facts by which we are surrounded—the history of things.
- 17A fact, inconsistent with the creed, is denounced as a lie, and the man who declares or announces the fact is a blasphemer.
- 18Truth is a cripple; lies have wings. It is almost impossible to overtake and kill and bury a lie.
- 19A public man, to be successful, must not assert anything unless it is exceedingly popular.
- 20No man can think as he desires. No man controls the action of his brain, any more than he controls the action of his heart.
- 21There is no dread of loss when all is growth and gain. With reckless hands we spend and waste and chide the flying hours for loitering by the way.
- 22The miracle of thought we cannot understand. The mystery of life and death we cannot comprehend.
- 23In the grave should be buried the prejudices and passions born of conflict. Charity should hold the scales in which are weighed the deeds of men.
- 24The philosopher does not hide. Secrecy is not the friend of truth. No man should be reverent at the expense of his reason.
- 25God is a king whose will is law, and men are serfs and slaves.
- 26The civilized husband places the happiness of his wife above his own. Her love is the wealth of his heart, and to guard her from evil is the business of his life.
- 27Most people imagine that the rich are in heaven, but, as a rule, it is only a gilded hell.
- 28We have lived to see the Bible tested by Science, and, what is more, we have lived to see reason the standard not only in religion, but in all the domain of science.
- 29I thank all who have adorned, enriched and ennobled life—all who have created the great, the noble, the heroic and artistic ideals.
- 30There is nothing in plowing the fields to make men cross, cruel and crabbed.
July
- 1The moment man begins to be civilized he begins to appreciate how little he knows, how very circumscribed in its very nature human knowledge is.
- 2The Freethinker knows that the universe is natural—that there is no room, even in infinite space, for the miraculous, for the impossible.
- 3The superior man is the man who loves his fellow-man.
- 4Our Government is founded on the equality of human rights—on the idea, the sacred truth, that all are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
- 5The fear of punishment may deter some, the fear of exposure others; but there is no real reforming power in fear or punishment.
- 6A fool friend is the sewer of bad news, of slander and all base and unpleasant things.
- 7The church in all ages and among all peoples has been the consistent enemy of the human race.
- 8An angry man can neither reason himself, nor perceive the reason of what another says.
- 9A man looks at the sea, and the sea says something to him.
- 10The State in which a criminal cannot have an impartial trial is not civilized.
- 11I do not want the church or the state to come between the man and wife.
- 12If we wish to make the future of the Republic glorious we must educate the children of the present.
- 13If a man should be honest with himself he should be honest with others.
- 14The more we know, the more beauty, the more poetry we find. Ignorance is not the mother of the poetic or artistic.
- 15Nothing is so profoundly mournful as a home that has been covered with shame—a wife that is worse than widowed—children worse than orphaned.
- 16The great principle underlying our system of government is that the people have the virtue and the patriotism to govern themselves.
- 17The wanderers hope for home.—Hope builds the house and plants the flowers and fills the air with song.
- 18There is no propriety in swapping superstitions—neither party can afford to give any boot.
- 19A church founded on slavery—that is to say, on blind obedience, worshiping irresponsible and arbitrary power, must of necessity be the enemy of human freedom.
- 20A heart breaks, a man dies, a leaf falls in the far forest, a babe is born, and the great world sweeps on.
- 21From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.
- 22We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry.
- 23Over all wealth, above all station, above the noble, the robed and crowned, rises the sincere man.
- 24The hand is burned, and after that the child keeps its hand out of the fire.
- 25Let me tell you to-day it is far more important to build a home than to erect a church.
- 26In every way the clergy sought to evade the facts, to dodge the truth, to preserve the creed.
- 27The Christians are not agreed among themselves as to what books are inspired.
- 28An orator must be a poet, a metaphysician, a logician—and above all, must have sympathy with all.
- 29The gem of the brain is the innocence of the soul.
- 30Labor is the great oak, labor is the great column, and labor, with its deft and cunning hands, has created the countless things of art and beauty.
- 31Let every man be his own bishop, let every man be his own pope, let every man do his own thinking, let every man have a brain of his own.
August
- 1No man should wish or endeavor to win a case that he knows is wrong.
- 2If the foundation is not justice, the dome cannot be high enough, or splendid enough, to save the temple.
- 3Nothing else is so well calculated to make friends of all nations as really to become acquainted with the best that each has produced.
- 4The institution of marriage is a failure to the extent, and only to the extent, that the human race is a failure.
- 5All beauty is relative. Probably the most beautiful thing to a frog is the speckled belly of another frog, or to a snake the markings of another snake.
- 6To help others help themselves is the only real charity. There is no use in boosting a man who is not climbing.
- 7Nothing ever happened beneath the dome of heaven that could have been avoided.
- 8A lie is unnatural. A lie, in the nature of things, is a monstrosity.
- 9No catastrophe can be great enough, no ruin wide-spread enough, to engulf or blot out the wisdom of the world.
- 10Every schoolhouse is an arsenal, filled with weapons and ammunition to destroy the monsters of ignorance and fear.
- 11The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.
- 12Surely we do not need an inspired book to teach us that slavery is right, that polygamy is virtue, and that intellectual liberty is a crime.
- 13A great nation should be bound by the highest conception of justice and honor.
- 14The men of science have explored heaven and earth, and with infinite patience have furnished the facts. The brave thinkers have used them.
- 15Praise for the noble dead is an inspiration for the noble living.
- 16Brain without heart is far more dangerous than heart without brain.
- 17A country that guarantees liberty to all cannot be too large.
- 18I would like to see corporal punishment done away with in every home, in every school, in every asylum, reformatory, and prison.
- 19I stand by the religion of reason. I stand by the dogmas of demonstration.
- 20A man who deserts the truth because it is unpopular is a blasphemer.
- 21The savage who understands the habits of animals, who is a good hunter and fisher, is a man of education, taking into consideration his circumstances.
- 22Liberty is my religion. Liberty of hand and brain—of thought and labor.
- 23Solemnity is a mask worn by ignorance and hypocrisy—it is the preface, prologue, and index to the cunning or the stupid.
- 24The man who hates the black man because he is black, has the same spirit as he who hates the poor man because he is poor. It is the spirit of caste.
- 25The drama is a crystallization of history, an epitome of the human heart.
- 26Freedom believes in education—the salvation of slavery is ignorance.
- 27A great picture is the melody of form and color. A great statue does not suggest labor; it seems to have been created as a joy.
- 28The future has been filled with fear, stained and polluted by the heartless past.
- 29The great body of the people make all the money; do all the work. They plow the land, cut down the forests; they produce everything that is produced.
- 30A civilized man does not believe in the methods of savagery.
- 31The great reason why the orthodox creeds have become unpopular is, that all teach the dogma of eternal pain.
September
- 1Every good man hates and despises the wretch who abuses wife and child—who rules by curses and blows and makes his home a kind of hell.
- 2Courage without conscience is a wild beast. Patriotism without principle is the prejudice of birth, the animal attachment to place.
- 3Any man who wishes to force his brother to work—to toil—more than eight hours a day is not a civilized man.
- 4A Government that will not protect its citizens is a disgrace to humanity.
- 5The only way to make men temperate is to develop the brain.
- 6The rights of man are more sacred than the dictates of any creed.
- 7The heretics have not thought and suffered and died in vain. Every heretic has been, and is, a ray of light.
- 8Every child should be taught that useful work is worship and that intelligent labor is the highest form of prayer.
- 9The glory of science is, that it is freeing the soul—breaking the mental manacles—getting the brain out of bondage—giving courage to thought—filling the world with mercy, justice, and joy.
- 10We are satisfied that nothing more wonderful has happened than is now happening.
- 11The church has been the enemy of progress, for the reason that it has endeavored to prevent man thinking for himself.
- 12The poets have always lived in an ideal world, and that ideal world has always been far better than the real world.
- 13The grave is not a throne, and a corpse is not a king. Man should not try to live on ashes.
- 14Love is a flower that grows on the edge of the grave.
- 15The nations in love with life, have games. To them existence is exultation. They are fond of nature.
- 16Woman is not the intellectual inferior of man. She has lacked, not mind, but opportunity.
- 17The individual lives the life of the race, and the child is charmed with what the race in its infancy produced.
- 18The star that shines above that dawn, the herald of that day, is Science, not superstition,—Reason, not religion.
- 19When people read, they reason, when they reason they progress.
- 20The great poet seems as unconscious as Nature, and the product of the highest art seems to have been felt instead of thought.
- 21Suspicion is the soil in which prejudice grows, and prejudice is the upas tree in whose shade reason fails and justice dies.
- 22As the child grows, facts take the place of the old beliefs, and the same is true of the race.
- 23When men are prosperous, they are in love with life.
- 24After all, the real question is not whether the Bible is inspired, but whether it is true.
- 25There is no possible connection between superstition and the spiritual, or between theology and the spiritual.
- 26Superstition is the child of ignorance and the mother of misery.
- 27The stage has ever been the altar, the pulpit, the cathedral of the heart.
- 28Every little brain becomes a menagerie, filled with wild beasts from hell. The imagination is polluted with the deformed, the monstrous and malicious.
- 29If the Bible is true, the science known as geology is false and every fossil is a petrified perjurer.
- 30A poem is produced by the forces of nature, and is as necessarily and naturally produced as mountains and seas.
October
- 1There is in the intellectual world, as in the material, decay and growth, and ever by the grave of buried age stand youth and joy.
- 2Ignorance is the mother of mystery and misery, of superstition and sorrow, of waste and want.
- 3Nothing is so prolific, nothing can so multiply itself, nothing can lay and hatch as many eggs, as a good, healthy, religious lie.
- 4To-day the need of our civilization is public men who have the courage to speak as they think.
- 5Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.
- 6In youth we front the sun; we live in light without a fear, without a thought of dusk or night.
- 7All paths, whether filled with thorns or flowers, end here. Here success and failure are the same.
- 8Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State.
- 9If God be the keeper of an eternal penitentiary, he should not imprison there the men who broke the chains of slavery here.
- 10Let us develop the brain and civilize the heart. Let us ascertain the conditions of happiness and live in accordance with them.
- 11Man should think; he should use all his senses; he should examine; he should reason.
- 12The press is untrammeled. And that is all that the right should ever ask—a free press, free speech, and the protection of person. That is enough.
- 13Every religion is a natural product—the result of conditions.
- 14The scientists never persecuted, never imprisoned their fellow-men.
- 15Happiness is wealth. We can be happy without being rich—without holding office—without being famous.
- 16I hate to see brain the slave of the material god. I hate to see money own genius.
- 17As long as men believe in tyranny in heaven they will practice tyranny on earth.
- 18Every convenience, everything of use, everything of beauty in the world, we owe to free labor and to free thought.
- 19How perilous, after all, is the state of man. It is the work of a life to build a great and splendid character.
- 20The fool friend regards your reputation as common prey for all the vultures, hyenas and jackals.
- 21When man is unprejudiced, and his passions subject to reason, it is well he should define the limits of power, so that the waves driven by the storm of passion shall not overbear the shore.
- 22No science should be neglected; no fact should be overlooked. Inventions should be described and understood.
- 23The supernatural can be constructed with no material except the natural.
- 24We must remember that revenge is always in haste, and that justice can always afford to wait until the evidence is actually heard.
- 25The time will come when it will be utterly impossible for a man to go down to death, grasping millions in the clutch of avarice.
- 26I believe in the schools for manual training, and that every child should be taught not only to think, but to do, and that the hand should be educated with the brain.
- 27A God cannot annihilate or create matter. Annihilation and creation are both impossible—unthinkable.
- 28In the orthodox Sunday schools, children are taught that it is a duty to believe—that evidence is not essential—that faith is independent of facts and that religion is superior to reason.
- 29There is no logic in abuse. There is no argument in epithet.
- 30I do believe that usefulness is the highest possible form of worship.
- 31The man who doubts the right of the people to govern themselves casts a little doubt upon the question, simply because he is not man enough himself to believe in liberty.
November
- 1Let us hope, if there be a God that he is wise and good.
- 2For the followers of one god to treat the followers of another god decently is a kind of treason.
- 3No church asserting that belief is necessary to salvation ever was, or ever will be, the champion of true liberty.
- 4Let us believe that pure thoughts, brave words and generous deeds can never die.
- 5Happy is the man who neither paints nor patches, veils nor veneers. Blessed is he who wears no mask.
- 6The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.
- 7In liberty extravagance is economy. Let us be just. Let us be generous to each other.
- 8Everywhere pain, disease and death—death that does not wait for bent forms and gray hairs, but clutches babes and happy youths.
- 9There is no very great difference of opinion among civilized people as to what is or is not moral.
- 10There are mental misers—men who gather learning all their lives and keep it to themselves.
- 11The Bible is opposed to religious toleration—to religious liberty.
- 12Every field is a picture, a landscape; every landscape a poem; every flower a tender thought, and every forest a fairy-land.
- 13Liberty is the soil and light and rain—it is the plant and bud and flower and fruit—and in that sacred word lie all the seeds of progress, love and joy.
- 14Everything that gives laughter to the world—laughter springing from good nature, that is the most wonderful music that has ever enriched the ears of man.
- 15The free man, working for wife and children, gets his head and his hands in partnership.
- 16Morality is the harmony between act and circumstance. It is the melody of conduct. A wonderful statue is the melody of proportion.
- 17From the wondrous tree of life the buds and blossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth, patriarchs and babes sleep side by side.
- 18The religious argument that has to be supported by a musket, is hardly worth making.
- 19Let us remember that criminals are produced by conditions, and let us do what we can to change the conditions and to reform the criminals.
- 20All claims are put in the crucible of investigation—the object being to separate the true from the false.
- 21The dead leaves are all orthodox, while the new ones and the buds are all heretics.
- 22A mighty Nation bends above its honored graves, and pays to noble dust the tribute of its love.
- 23The working people should be protected by law; if they are not, the capitalists will require just as many hours as human nature can bear.
- 24Party at best is only a means—the good of the country, the happiness of the people, the only end.
- 25No civilized man wishes to live where the mob is supreme.
- 26The moment it is admitted that all phenomena are within the domain of the natural, the necessity for a priest has disappeared.
- 27Every minister is heretical just to the extent that intellect is above the average.
- 28The passion of the savage is uninfluenced by his thought, while the thought of the philosopher is uninfluenced by passion.
- 29Most of the intellectual giants of the world have been nursed at the sad and loving breast of poverty.
- 30In the presence of demonstration there is no opportunity for the exercise of faith.
December
- 1Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.
- 2All arts are born of the same spirit, and express like thoughts in different ways—that is to say, they produce like states of mind and feeling.
- 3The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.
- 4Music is the sunshine—the climate—of the soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June.
- 5I believe in heaven here and now—the heaven of health and good digestion—of strength and long life—of usefulness and joy.
- 6Every industrious man adds to the wealth, not only of his nation, but to that of the world.
- 7Happiness is the result of all that is really right and sane.
- 8We are done with the supernatural. We are through with the miraculous and the impossible.
- 9There is one truth, however, that you must not forget, and that is, that every evil tends to correct and abolish itself.
- 10Nothing can be more marvelous than the common and everyday facts of life.
- 11Some people are naturally suspicious. It is an infinitely mean trait in human nature. Suspicion is only another form of cowardice.
- 12As man becomes civilized, educated, he finally has more confidence in his reason than in his eyes.
- 13Hunger falls upon its knees, and heaven, looked for through tears, is the mirage of misery. But prosperity brings joy and wealth and leisure—and the beautiful is born.
- 14A Christian will not admit that a passage in the Bible is uninspired, until he is satisfied that it is untrue.
- 15The spiritual man lives to his ideal. He endeavors to make others happy.
- 16Miracles are not simply impossible, but they are unthinkable by any man capable of thinking.
- 17The laughter that died away beneath the touch of death is heard again and lips that fell to ashes long ago are curved once more with mirth.
- 18Many utterances attributed to Christ shock my brain and heart. They are absurd and cruel.
- 19If the Bible is true, slavery is right, and the world should go back to the barbarism of the lash and chain.
- 20The people are beginning to think, to reason and to investigate. Slowly, painfully, but surely, the gods are being driven from the earth.
- 21Every man is forced to admit that he does not agree with all the great men, living or dead.
- 22The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new.
- 23Whoever attacks the popular falsehoods of his time will find that a lie defends itself by telling other lies.
- 24As a matter of fact, public men,—that is to say, men in office,—reflect the average intelligence of the people, and no more.
- 25The sun is the god of benefits, of growth, of life, of warmth, of happiness, of joy. The sun is the all-seeing, the all-pitying, the all-loving.
- 26There is no more perfect picture on the earth, or within the imagination of man, than a mother holding in her thrilled and happy arms a child, the fruit of love.
- 27In the gathering gloom the fires slowly die, while memory dreams of youth, and hope sometimes mistakes the glow of ashes for the coming of another morn.
- 28Out on the wide waste seas, there drifts no spar. Over the desert of death the sphinx gazes forever, but never speaks.
- 29When the intelligent submit to the clamor of the many, anarchy begins and the Republic reaches the edge of chaos.
- 30A great man throws pearls before swine, and the swine are sometimes changed to men.
- 31Right and wrong are not revelations from some supposed god, but have been discovered through the experience and intelligence of man.