children to be stolen, no cradles to be
violated. I know that science has given us better houses; I know it
has given us better pictures and better books; I know it has given us
better wives and better husbands, and more beautiful children. I know
it has enriched a thousand-fold our lives; and for that reason I am in
favor of intellectual liberty.

I know not, I say, what discoveries may lead the world to glory; but I
do know that from the infinite sea of the future never a greater or
grander blessing will strike this bank and shoal of time than liberty
for man, woman and child.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have delivered this lecture a great many times;
clergymen have attended, and editors of religious newspapers, and they
have gone away and written in their papers and declared in their
pulpits that in this lecture I advocated universal adultery; they have
gone away and said it was obscene and disgusting. Between me and my
clerical maligners, between me and my religious slanderers, I leave
you, ladies and gentlemen, to judge.

Ingersoll's Lecture on Human Rights

Ladies and Gentlemen: I suppose that man, from the most grotesque
savage up to Heckle, has had a philosophy by which he endeavored to
account for all the phenomena of nature he may have observed. From
that mankind may have got their ideas of right and wrong. Now, where
there are no rights there can be no duties. Let us always remember
that only as a man becomes free can he by any possibility become good
or great. As I said, every savage has had his philosophy, and by it
accounted for everything he observed. He had an idea of rain and
rainbow, and he had an idea of a controlling power. One said there is
a being who presides over our world, and who will destroy us unless we
do right. Others had many of these beings, but they were invariably
like themselves. The most fruitful imagination cannot make more than a
man, though it may make infinite powers and attributes out of the
powers and attributes of man. You can't build a God unless you start
with a human being. The savage said, when there was a storm, "Somebody
is angry." When lightning leaped from the lurid cloud, he thought,
"What have I been doing?" and when he couldn't think of any wrong he
had been doing, he tried to think of some wrong his neighbor had been
doing.

I may as well state here that I believe man has come up from the lowest
orders of creation, and may have not come