Clarence Darrow Quotes - Page 6

When every event was a miracle, when there was no order or system or law, there was no occasion for studying any subject, or being interested in anything excepting a religion which took care of the soul. As man doubted the primitive conceptions about religion, and no longer accepted the literal, miraculous teachings of ancient books, he set himself to understand nature.

Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial.

It is bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins.

The difference between the child and the man lies chiefly in the unlimited confidence and buoyancy of youth.

In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality.

In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If 'natural rights' means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception.

Calvin Coolidge was the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont.

I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.

I cannot tell and I shall never know how many words of mine might have given birth to cruelty in place of love and kindness and charity.

It is not for the world to judge, but to crown them all alike. Each and all lived out their own being, did their work in their own way, and carried a reluctant, stupid humanity to greater possibilities and grander heights.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men.

A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.

Lawyers are natural politicians.

The truth is, no man is white and no man is black. We are all freckled.

The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth

I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it.

Do you think you can cure the hatreds and the maladjustments of the world by hanging them? You simply show your ignorance and your hate when you say it. You may here and there cure hatred with love and understanding, but you can only add fuel to the flames by cruelty and hate.

The purpose of man is like the purpose of a pollywog - to wiggle along as far as he can without dying; or, to hang to life until death takes him.

Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man's origin, capacity and responsibility.

Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

It is just as often a great misfortune to be the child of the rich as it is to be the child of the poor. Wealth has its misfortunes. Too much, too great opportunity and advantage given to a child has its misfortunes.

The audience that storms the box-office of the theater to gain entrance to a sensational show is small and sleepy compared with the throng that crashes the courthouse door when something concerning real life and death is to be laid bare to the public.

The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.

I am simply an agnostic. I haven't yet had time or opportunity to explore the universe, and I don't know what I might run on to in some nook or corner.

If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.