“Whoever attacks a custom or a creed, will be confronted with a list of the names of the dead who upheld the custom, or believed the creed. He is asked in a very triumphant and sneering way, if he knows more than all the great and honored of the past. Every defender of a creed has graven upon his memory the names of all "great" men whose actions or words can be tortured into evidence for his doctrine.”
The Great Infidels (1881)
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Robert G. Ingersoll439
Union United States Army officer 1833–1899Related quotes
Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector
Plato: The Trial and Death of Socrates (pp. 50-51)
Classics Revisited (1968)
Context: No one was required to believe in the gods as Christians believe in their creeds. Socrates had always been scrupulous in observance of every accepted principle and practice of community life. However, from his questioning he had developed a civic and personal morality founded on reason rather than custom. He envisioned it as subject to continuous criticism and revaluation in terms of the ever-expanding freedom of morally autonomous but cooperating persons, who together made up a community whose characteristic aim was an organically growing depth, breadth, intensity of experience — experience finally of that ultimate reality characterized by Socrates as good, true and beautiful.
The accusers were right. This is a new religion which bears scant resemblance to the old. Civic piety is founded on the recognition of ignorance and the nurture of the soil until it becomes capable of true knowledge — which is a state of being, a moral condition called freedom. The Greek city-state, not to speak of the tribal community, knew nothing of freedom in this sense, but only the liberty that distinguished the free man from the slave.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1849/feb/01/address-in-answer-to-the-speech in the House of Commons (1 February 1849). <br class="br">1840s
“Out on the heartless creed which nulls the claim
Upon the heart of kindred, birth, and name.”
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
The Golden Violet - The Child of the Sea
The Golden Violet (1827)
Leon MacLaren (1910–1994) British philosopher
Leon MacLaren, Nature of Society and Other Essays
Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter
Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 5, p. 71
Nesta Helen Webster (1876–1960) British far-right conspiracy theorist and author
Source: World Revolution the Plot Against Civilization https://www.google.com.br/books/edition/World_Revolution_the_Plot_Against_Civili/dmlTCAAAQBAJ?gbpv=1&pg=PT162&printsec=frontcover
Poul Anderson book The Longest Voyage
The Longest Voyage (p. 171)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
Duarte Barbosa (1480–1545) Portuguese explorer and writer
The Book of Duarte Barbosa, vol. I, p. 202. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2