Best of Robert Ingersoll: Selections from His Writings and Speeches [Paperback]

Robert G. Ingersoll (Author), Roger E. Greeley (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1993

Robert Ingersoll was America's finest orator and foremost leader of freethinkers. Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Eugene V. Debs, and Elizabeth Cady used to gather to hear the speeches of "the great agnostic". Roger E Greeley has selected the best from speeches and essays of this iconoclastic orator who laboured to destroy the superstition and hypocrisy of fundamentalism in America and who answered the Moral Majority in the last century. One hundred years after he advanced into the national spotlight, Ingersoll's commentaries still retain their fresh, penetrating, and witty character. His pleas for civil rights, the rights of women and children, responsible and responsive government, and individual freedom of conscience and religious belief have placed him in the vanguard of enlightened thinkers. Today the legacy of Robert Ingersoll, prophet and pioneer, merits the attention of anyone who espouses humane, liberal, rational, or agnostic opinions.

Product Details

• Paperback: 175 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (January 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879752092
• ISBN-13: 978-0879752095
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #556,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

127 of 129 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Great Agnostic, January 9, 2002

By 

Douglas Harper (Lancaster, Pa., U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Best of Robert Ingersoll: Selections from His Writings and Speeches (Paperback)

Nobody knows Ingersoll's name today, and that's a shame. America has pushed him down into the footnotes of its history books. If it remembers him at all, it is as an atheist crackpot, a son of Tom Paine.

"I would rather be right than be president." Henry Clay said it, but if he hadn't, Col. Robert G. Ingersoll would have. It was certainly more true of Ingersoll than of Clay. He had the qualities people sought, then and now, in a leader. He had a keen, powerful mind; he was a matchless orator in an age which understood, and adored, oratory. He had led a regiment bravely in battle in the Civil War. He was honest, moral, dignified and in love with his wife and daughters. But when people encouraged him to run for president, or governor, he told them it was impossible, that he could only win votes if he would renounce his agnosticism, which he would never do. He would renounce high office rather than be false to his conception of truth. Between power and integrity there was, for him, no choice. And this disqualified him for office.

Mark Twain idolized him. Oscar Wilde, when he came to the United States, was curious to see this man Ingersoll whose lectures were so much more in demand than his own. He attended several Ingersoll performances, and pronounced him "the most intelligent man in America." It has been written that Frederick Douglass said that, "of all the great men of his personal acquaintance, there had been only two in whose presence he could be without feeling that he was regarded as inferior to them -- Abraham Lincoln and Robert Ingersoll."

People turned out by the thousands to hear him speak -- 50,000 one night in Chicago, in the days before microphones and sound systems. Ingersoll criss-crossed an America still deeply pious, heaping scorn on the brutality of religion. By the time he died in 1899, he had probably been heard by more human beings than any other person who lived in the 19th century. Although Ingersoll launched a broad-front free-thinker's assault on religious credulity, people seemed to focus on his words against the stupider aspects of Christianity, the ones that good, intelligent people had, by the late 1800s, outgrown. His sarcasm shreded the lingering bigotry in the national religion.

He held the odd status of beloved agnostic in a Christian land, in part, because this public man was so clearly living an honest, useful and loving life. His house was filled with spiritual and intellectual light, and he used a wonderful mind and a matchless personal power in the service of the good of all humanity. He frankly advocated equality for women when few men did, and he damned child abuse masquerading as parental authority. "Gentlemen," he said in one circumstance, "it isn't to have you think that I would call Christ 'an illegitimate child' which hurts me: it is that you should think that I would think any the less of Christ if I knew it was so."

His friend Walt Whitman probably captured the common view of Ingersoll when he called him, "a fiery blast for new virtues, which are only old virtues done over for honest use again." The odd thing is, Ingersoll would have been shut out of public discourse in America today. The fundamentalist movement began a few years after Ingersoll died, and the level of public and private spirituality in this country sank steadily and rapidly, unto the current level, where leading "men of faith" include Bob Jones and Jimmy Swaggart, "a cellarage only to be gazed at across the barriers of libel law."

Ingersoll's words and his life give proof to the suspicion many Americans may have, but few dare utter, that people without religion can live full, generous public lives, can have a better sense of right and wrong, than those bound up in creeds. I look forward to the day when I can cast a vote for a man as worthy as Ingersoll to be president of the United States, whether he believes in God or not. I doubt I will live to do it.

48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars With soap, baptism is a good thing!, February 16, 2005

By 

Lee V. Douglas (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Best of Robert Ingersoll: Selections from His Writings and Speeches (Paperback)

The title I have chosen is a quotation from Ingersoll that lost him a teaching job in Illinois because the seminary students to whom he said it in answer to a question they asked reported it to the school's principal. His speeches and writings are full of barbs like this that can have an audience in stitches, and it is no wonder that he was paid as much as $5,000 (in the ninetheenth century) to speak to thousands of delighted people.

After his aborted teaching career he married a fine and affluent woman who shared his views. They moved to New York and Ingersoll devoted the rest of his life to writing and to public speaking.

It is not easy to dislike this man, even if one disagrees with him, because his best is hilarious and always on the mark. America's Great Agnostic expressed himself with clarity and always with the compassion that some of his Christian critics lacked. Witness the debates between him and the Reverend Talmadge, which have appeared in print.

Ingersoll loved children, and only when he criticized religious teachings designed to terrify children into trembling piety did he become indignant and acerbic. Otherwise, he spoke of religion with rollicking humor.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate him is to read an entire, short text, such as "Some mistakes of Moses." Single quotations may not do him justice.

He died in 1899, but his ashes were kept in New York because they were not allowed interment in Arlington National Cemetery until 1932. I have visited his grave, and the stone does not bear a cross, as most do--a breath of clean air in a country now sinking into the dark ignorance of the religious right.

We need more of Robert Ingersoll. Read his works and roar with laughter along with him.

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "Must Read" if you consider yourself a free thinker, June 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Best of Robert Ingersoll: Selections from His Writings and Speeches (Paperback)

Roger Greeley brings Ingersoll to life! He's laid out and categorized by subject some of the best quotations and speeches of the Great Robert Ingersoll. I recently went to hear Greeley speak at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg and discovered that Greeley has a keen understanding of Ingersoll and it shows in his book. I believe the insight and compassion of Ingersoll expressed over a century ago, applies more today than ever. Everyone should have the chance to enjoy this collection that Roger Greeley has put together, and escape the world of fear and bigotry that religion attempts to pass off as love.