All prayers die in the air which they uselessly agitate.
Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.
Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man.
Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.
Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.
Insolence is not logic; epithets are the arguments of malice.
The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others.
There is no slavery but ignorance.
It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.
In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.
Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
As far as I am concerned I wish to be out on the high seas. I wish to take my chances with wind, and wave, and star. And I had rather go down in the glory and grandeur of the storm, than rot in any orthodox harbor.
It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.
With soap, baptism is a good thing.
There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, east a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.
Every man who expresses an honest thought is a soldier in the army of intellectual liberty.
He loves his country best who strives to make it best.
If I had my way I’d make health catching instead of disease.
One laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still.
One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests.