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.

No man is a good citizen, a good neighbor, a good friend, or a good man just because he obeys the law. The intrinsic worth is determined mainly by the intrinsic make-up.

The purpose of life is to live it.

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

There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.

No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism.