Clarence Darrow Quotes

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.

One believes in the truthfulness of a man because of his long experience with the man, and because the man has always told a consistent story. But no man has told so consistent a story as nature.

Punishment as punishment is not admissible unless the offender has had the freewill to select his course.

Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.

One cannot live through a long stretch of years without forming some philosophy of life.

A criminal is someone without the capital to incorporate

Different strokes for different folks.

Everybody is a potential murderer. I've never killed anyone, but I frequently get satisfaction reading the obituary notices.

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

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

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

I am an agnostic as to the question of God.

The efforts of the medical profession in the US to control:...its...job it proposes to monopolize. It has been carrying on a vigorous campaign all over the country against new methods and schools of healing because it wants the business...I have watched this medical profession for a long time and it bears watching.

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.

There are two things that kill a genius - a fatal disease and contentment.

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

Thirteen states with a population less than that of New York State alone can prevent repeal [of prohibition] until Halley's comet returns. One might as well talk about a summer vacation on Mars.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.

Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document? We now know pretty well where the various books came from, and about when they were written. We know that they were written by human beings who had no knowledge of science, little knowledge of life, and were influenced by the barbarous morality of primitive times, and were grossly ignorant of most things that men know today.

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

You can't get to a pleasant place to be at unless you use pleasant methods to get there. When you are dealing with a human society the means is fully as important as the end.

There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.

It’s not bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel- he believes in punishment.

If there is a soul, what is it, and where did it come from, and where does it go? Can anyone who is guided by his reason possibly imagine a soul independent of a body, or the place of its residence, or the character of it, or anything concerning it? If man is justified in any belief or disbelief on any subject, he is warranted in the disbelief in a soul. Not one scrap of evidence exists to prove any such impossible thing.

Most lawyers only tell you about the cases they win. I can tell you about some I lose. A lawyer who wins all his cases does not have many.

Probably the undertaker thinks less of death than almost any other man. He is so accustomed to it that his mind must involuntarily turn from its horror to a contemplation of how much he makes out of the burial.

Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man.

Wars always bring about a conservative reaction. They overwhelm and destroy patient and careful efforts to improve the condition of man.

Cheating, having 'hoes,' none of that is cute. To be honest, it's really immature. I don't see how people take pride in breaking someone's heart. The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.

Justice has nothing to do with what goes on in a courtroom; Justice is what comes out of a courtroom

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

I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here.

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.

It may never come, but I fancy than no man who has sympathy for the human race does not wish that sometime those who labor should have the whole product of their toil. Probably it will never come, but I wish that the time might come when men who work in the industries would own the industries.

The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor's heart - and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word.

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.

Criminal cases receive the attention of the press. The cruel and disagreeable things of life are more apt to get the newspaper space than the pleasant ones. It must be that most people enjoy hearing of and reading about the troubles of others. Perhaps men unconsciously feel that they rise in the general level as others go down.

I go to a better tailor than any of you and pay more for my clothes. The only difference is that you probably don't sleep in yours.

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.

Everyone is the heir to all that has gone before; his structure and emotional life is fixed, and no two children of nature have the same heredity. I believe everyone should and must live out what is in him. So no two lives can be the same.

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.

Everything serious that he says is a joke and everything humorous that he says is dead serious.

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.

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

Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document?

Instead of yielding to idle conversation it might profit one to cultivate silence and contemplation.