I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma. We need men like him today more than ever. His writing still inspires us and challenges the “better angels” of our nature, when people open their hearts and minds to his simple, honest humanity. Thank goodness he was here.
CAMDEN, N. J., MARCH 30, 1892.
The saints have poisoned life with piety. They have soured the mother’s milk. They have insisted that joy is crime—that beauty is a bait with which the Devil captures the souls of men—that laughter leads to sin—that pleasure, in its every form, degrades, and that love itself is but the loathsome serpent of unclean desire. They have tried to compel men to love shadows rather than women—phantoms rather than people. 
Art is not a sermon, and the artist is not a preacher. Art accomplishes by indirection. The beautiful refines. The perfect in art suggests the perfect in conduct. Robert Green Ingersoll
Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death Hope sees a star and listening Love can hear the rustle of a wing.
YOUR FORBEARS FLOCKED TO HIS LECTURES
LET THIS GREAT MAN SPEAK TO YOU
AS HE DID TO THEM
YOU WILL NEVER SEE COMMON SENSE
EXPRESSED SO BEAUTIFULLY
All I insist is, if there is another life, the basest soul that finds its way to that dark or radiant shore will have the everlasting chance of doing right.
Nothing but the most cruel ignorance, the most heartless superstition, the most ignorant theology, ever imagined that the few days of human life spent here, surrounded by mists and clouds of darkness, blown over life’s sea by storms and tempests of passion, fixed for all eternity the condition of the human race.
If this doctrine be true this life is but a net, in which Jehovah catches souls for hell.
Mark Twain, was also a speaker at this great event. He said of Ingersoll’s speech: the supremest combination of words that was ever put together since the world began …Bob Ingersoll’s music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears.
Washington, D. C., January 8, 1882. A DC detective friend asked Ingersoll to speak at his child’s grave.
The real Bible is not the work of inspired men, or prophets, or apostles, or evangelists, or of Christs.