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"Belief is not subject to the will. Men think as they must. Children do not, and cannot, believe exactly as they were taught. They are not exactly like their parents. They differ in temperament, in experience, in capacity, in surroundings. And so there is a continual, though almost imperceptible change. There is development, conscious and unconscious growth, and by comparing long periods of time we find that the old has been almost abandoned, almost lost in the new."
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"Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this - and out of nothing - can still count the hairs of my head."

"Though man needs to live to believe, he does not need to believe to live."

"You don't so much as become an atheist as find out that's what you are. There's no moment of conversion. You don't suddenly think 'I don't believe this anymore.' You essentially find you don't believe it."

"Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them."

"It is one thing to believe and another to know."
Explore more quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll

"If God created the universe, there was a time when he commenced to create. Back of that commencement there must have been an eternity. In that eternity what was this God doing? He certainly did not think. There was nothing to think about. He did not remember. Nothing had ever happened. What did he do? Can you imagine anything more absurd than an infinite intelligence in infinite nothing wasting an eternity?"

"With every drop of my blood I hate and execrate every form of tyranny, every form of slavery. I hate dictation. I love liberty."

"When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then - and not until then - will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth."

"Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State. Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave and independent man - the man of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force."

"Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty."

"Belief is not subject to the will. Men think as they must. Children do not, and cannot, believe exactly as they were taught. They are not exactly like their parents. They differ in temperament, in experience, in capacity, in surroundings. And so there is a continual, though almost imperceptible change. There is development, conscious and unconscious growth, and by comparing long periods of time we find that the old has been almost abandoned, almost lost in the new."

"But those who are incapable ofpitying animals are, as a matter of fact, incapable of pitying men.A physician who would cut a living rabbit in pieces -- laying barethe nerves, denuding them with knives, pulling them out withforceps -- would not hesitate to try experiments with men and womenfor the gratification of his curiosity."
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