Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.Ingersoll, Robert Green
Religion
Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
I tell you there is something splendid in man that will not always
mind. Why, if we had done as the kings told us five hundred years ago,
we would all have been slaves. If we had done as the priests told us
we would all have been idiots. If we had done as the doctors told us
we would all have been dead. We have been saved by disobedience. We
have been saved by that splendid thing called independence, and I want
to see more of it, day after day, and I want to see children raised so
they will have it. That is my doctrine. Give the children a chance.
Be perfectly honor bright with them, and they will be your friends when
you are old. Don't try to teach them something they can never learn.
Don't insist upon their pursuing some calling they have no sort of
faculty for. Don't make that poor girl play ten years on a piano when
she has no ear for music, and when she has practiced until she can play
"Bonaparte crossing the Alps," and you can't tell after she has played
it whether Bonaparte ever got across or not. Men are oaks, women are
vines, children are flowers, and if there is any Heaven in this world,
it is in the family. It is where the wife loves the husband, and the
husband loves the wife, and where the dimpled arms of children are
about the necks of both. That is Heaven, if there is any--and I do not
want any better Heaven in another world than that, and if in another
world I can not live with the ones I loved here, then I would rather
not be there. I would rather resign.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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