He was born in Bloomington, Illinois and founded Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts movement community in East Aurora, New York in 1895. This grew from his private press, the Roycroft Press, which was inspired by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. (Although called the "Roycroft Press" by latter-day collectors and print historians, the organization called itself "The Roycrofters" and "The Roycroft Shops.")

Hubbard edited and published two magazines, "The Philistine" and "The Fra." "The Philistine" was a pioneering little magazine, bound in brown butcher paper and full of satire and whimsy. (Hubbard himself quipped that the cover was butcher paper because "There is meat inside.") The Roycrofters produced handsome, if sometimes eccentric, books printed on handmade paper, and operated a fine bindery, a furniture shop, and shops producing modeled leather and hammered copper goods. They were a leading producer of "Mission-style" products.

Hubbard's second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, was a noted suffragist, and the Roycroft Shops became a site for meetings and conventions of radicals, freethinkers, reformers and suffragists. Hubbard became a popular lecturer, and his homespun philosophy evolved from a loose William Morris-inspired socialism to an ardent defense of free enterprise and American know-how. Hubbard was much mocked in the press for "selling out." Hubbard can now be viewed as a proto-Libertarian. The American writer L. Ron Hubbard was a nephew of Elbert, by the adoption of his father, into the Hubbard family.

He and his wife were killed in the sinking of the Lusitania by the German submarine, Unterseeboot 20 in May of 1915. The Roycroft Shops, run by Hubbard's son Elbert Hubbard II, operated until 1938.

Quotes

"Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific -- that is, truthful -- must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand."

"Theology, by diverting the attention of men from this life to another, and by endeavoring to coerce all men into one religion, constantly preaching that this world is full of misery, but the next world would be beautiful -- or not, as the case may be -- has forced on men the thought of fear where otherwise there might have been the happy abandon of nature."

"Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power."

"Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner."

"Faith is the effort to believe what your common sense tells you is not true."

"A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious, but who understands the nonexistent."

"Theology is Classified Superstition."

"A creed is an ossified metaphor."

"Heaven: The Coney Island of the Christian imagination."

"God -- the John Doe of philosophy and religion."

"A miracle is an event described by those to whom it was told by people who did not see it."

"Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one."

"Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead."

"Dogma is a lie reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe that they believe what someone else believes."

"No man should dogmatize except on the subject of theology. Here he can take his stand, and by throwing the burden of proof on the opposition, he is invincible."

"Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide."

"What we call God's justice is only man's idea of what he would do if he were God."

"When certain unmarried men, who had lost their capacity to sin, sat indoors, breathing bad air, and passed resolutions about what was right and what wrong, making rules for the guidance of the people, instead of trusting to the natural, happy instincts of the individual, they ushered in the Dark Ages. These are the gentlemen who blocked human evolution absolutely for a thousand years."

"Give us a religion that will help us to live -- we can die without assistance."

"Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive."