Robert Ingersoll: The damp and dropping dungeons.

I keep using this quote and I keep having to look it up over and over again. Ingersoll is so brilliant that I'm often forced to quote and genuflect from afar. But, for the sake of convenience I check my blog for things that I want to look up. Even if nobody reads the blog, I still use it as a quick reference guide to all the awesomeness I've encountered.

Is it nothing to free the mind? Is it nothing to civilize mankind? Is it nothing to fill the world with light, with discovery, with science? Is it nothing to dignify man and exalt the intellect? Is it nothing to grope your way into the dreary prisons, the damp and dropping dungeons, the dark and silent cells of superstition, where the souls of men are chained to floors of stone; to greet them like a ray of light, like the song of a bird, the murmur of a stream; to see the dull eyes open and grow slowly bright; to feel yourself grasped by the shrunken and unused hands, and hear yourself thanked by a strange and hollow voice?

Is it nothing to conduct these souls gradually into the blessed light of day -- to let them see again the happy fields, the sweet, green earth, and hear the everlasting music of the waves? Is it nothing to make men wipe the dust from their swollen knees, the tears from their blanched and furrowed cheeks? Is it a small thing to reave the heavens of an insatiate monster and write upon the eternal dome, glittering with stars, the grand word -- FREEDOM?

Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, http://www.thomaspaine.org/bio/ingersoll1870.html