Clarence Darrow Quotes

Ancestors do not mean so much. The rebel who succeeds generally makes it easier for the posterity that follows him; so these descendants are usually contented and smug and soft. Rebels are made from life, not ancestors. ~ Clarence Darrow

Religion is based on the insistence that over and above all is a purpose and a guiding hand that is beneficent and kind, and would not leave a hair unnumbered or let a sparrow fall unnoticed to the ground. Those who cherish such hallucinations forget that the all-loving power is inflicting tuberculosis, cancer, famine, and pestilence on the trusting, simple sons of men. ~ Clarence Darrow

The criminals who, in the face of contumely, hatred or violence, have led the world to a higher standard and brought humanity to a diviner order, have so loved truth and righteousness as to defy the law, and in every age these men have met the life of outcasts, and the death of felons. Whatever may be said of the necessity of government to protect itself, no one can believe that any human being merits punishment for following his own highest ideal. Punishment can only be in any wise defended upon the theory that the individual is untrue to himself, that his heart is bad. But all schemes of human punishment seem specially contrived to exempt this class of men. Those who are untrue to themselves find no difficulty in obeying the state, or at least in seeming to be subservient to its laws. The cunning man without strong convictions of right and wrong can always find ample room to operate his trade inside the dead line the law lays down. Even Blackstone wrote that a man who governed his conduct solely by the law was neither an honest man nor a good citizen. The penal code cannot pretend to cover all the vicious acts of men. If there is a distinction between vicious acts and righteous acts, each are so numerous that even to catalogue them would be beyond the power of the state. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

A jury is more apt to be unbiased and independent than a court, but they very seldom stand up against strong public clamor. Judges naturally believe the defendant is guilty. ~ Clarence Darrow

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads.

Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.

Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?

...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is no ~ Clarence Darrow

The purpose of life is to live it. ~ Clarence Darrow

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

Henry Lloyd was with Darrow when they toured the mine. It was a dreadful experience, Lloyd said, "like a foretaste of the inferno."

"You might as well get used to it," Darrow told him. Heaven was reserved for Wall Street financiers. Infidels like themselves would be rooming with Satan. ~ John A. Farrell

I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to? ~ Clarence Darrow

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

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

To think is to differ. ~ Clarence Darrow

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think. ~ Clarence Darrow

Every thought of pity is like the balm of Gilead to our souls. ~ Clarence Darrow

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

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed. ~ Clarence Darrow

The truth is that brains have little to do with either the making or accumulating of money. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they serve. ~ Clarence Darrow

History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history. ~ Clarence Darrow

Sympathy is the child of imagination ~ Clarence Darrow

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 the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~ Clarence Darrow

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business. ~ Clarence Darrow

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. ~ Clarence Darrow

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause ... True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one's purpose, and the sufficiency of one's own approval as a justification for one's own acts. ~ Clarence Darrow

The trouble with law is lawyers. ~ Clarence Darrow

No nation can be really great that is held together by Gatling guns, and no true loyalty can be induced and kept through fear. ~ Clarence Darrow

In the great flood of human life that is spawned upon the earth, it is not often that a man is born. ~ Clarence Darrow

Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.
~ Clarence Darrow

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and if no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever. ~ Clarence Darrow

My constitution was destroyed long ago; now I am living under the bylaws. ~ Clarence Darrow

It is indeed strange that with all the knowledge we have gained in the past hundred years we preserve and practice the methods of an ancient and barbarous world in our dealing with crime. So long as this is observed and exercised there can be no change except to heap more cruelties and more wretchedness upon those who are the victims of our foolish system. ~ Clarence Darrow

Money has been the most serious handicap that we have ever met. There are times when poverty is fortunate ~ Clarence Darrow

This book comes from the reflections and experience of more than forty years spent in court. Aside from the practice of my profession, the topics I have treated are such as have always held my interest and inspired a taste for books that discuss the human machine with its manifestations and the causes of its varied activity. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

I am always suspicious of righteous indignation. Nothing is more cruel than righteous indignation. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

Nature knows nothing about right and wrong, good and evil, pleasure and pain; she simply acts. She creates a beautiful woman, and places a cancer on her cheek. She may create an idealist, and kill him with a germ. She creates a fine mind, and then burdens it with a deformed body. And she will create a fine body, apparently for no use whatever. She may destroy the most wonderful life when its work has just commenced. She may scatter tubercular germs broadcast throughout the world. She seemingly works with no method, plan or purpose. She knows no mercy nor goodness. Nothing is so cruel and abandoned as Nature. To call her tender or charitable is a travesty upon words and a stultification of intellect. No one can suggest these obvious facts without being told that he is not competent to judge Nature and the God behind Nature. If we must not judge God as evil, then we cannot judge God as good. In all the other affairs of life, man never hesitates to classify and judge, but when it comes to passing on life, and the responsibility of life, he is told that it must be good, although the opinion beggars reason and intelligence and is a denial of both. Emotionally, I shall no doubt act as others do to the last moment of my existence. With my last breath I shall probably try to draw another, but, intellectually, I am satisfied that life is a serious burden, which no thinking, humane person would wantonly inflict on some one else. ~ Clarence Darrow

I knew that it is out of the question to have honest, economical government while a few are inordinately rich and the great mass of men are poor. In fact, it is to be doubted if anything really worthwhile can be done until there is a fairer distribution of wealth. ~ Clarence Darrow

To say that the universe was here last year, or millions of years ago, does not explain its origin. This is still a mystery. As to the question of the origin of things, man can only wonder
and doubt and guess. ~ Clarence Darrow

Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet. ~ Clarence Darrow

The nation that would to-day disarm its soldiers and turn its people to the paths of peace would accomplish more to its building up than by all the war taxes wrong from its hostile and
unwilling serfs ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

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

Clarence Darrow, one of history's greatest lawyers, once noted "There is no such thing as justice, in or out of court." Perhaps because justice is a flawed concept that ultimately comes down to the decision of twelve people. People with their own experiences, prejudices, feelings about what defines right and wrong. Which is why, when the system fails us, we must go out and seek our own justice. ~ Emily Thorne

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

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man
public opinion. ~ Clarence Darrow

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. ~ Clarence Darrow

The error I found in the philosophy of Henry George was its cocksureness, its simplicity, and the small value that it placed upon the selfish motives of men. The doctrine was a hang-over from the seventeenth century in France, when the philosophers had given up the idea of God, but still thought that there must be some immovable basis for man's conduct and ideals. 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. ~ Clarence Darrow

I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of. ~ Clarence Darrow

The only real lawyers are trial lawyers, and trial lawyers try cases to juries. ~ Clarence Darrow

There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court. ~ Clarence Darrow

Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical] law ... No one attributes freewill or motive to the material world. Is the conduct of man or the other animals any more subject to whim or choice than the action of the planets? ... We know that man's every act is induced by motives that led or urged him here or there; that the sequence of cause and effect runs through the whole universe, and is nowhere more compelling than with man. ~ Clarence Darrow

Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought - even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth. ~ Clarence Darrow

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

Clarence Darrow, America's best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history's most skilled orators. ~ Jill Lepore

The really intelligent are as abnormal as the defective. The great masses of men are rather mediocre, and those above and below are exceptions. ~ Clarence Darrow

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt. ~ Clarence Darrow

If a man really has charge of his destiny at all, he should have something to say about getting born; and I only came through by a hair's-breadth. What had I to do with this momentous first step? In the language of the lawyer, I was not even a party of the second part. ~ Clarence Darrow

I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose. ~ Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow," the New York Times proclaimed in its lead story, "bearded the lion of Fundamentalism today, faced William Jennings Bryan and a court room filled with believers of the literal word of the Bible and with a hunch of his shoulders and a thumb in his suspenders defied every belief they hold sacred. ~ Edward J. Larson

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means. ~ Clarence Darrow

The ablest lawyers are always associated with the biggest fees. ~ Clarence Darrow

I believe that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either. I don't believe in God as I don't believe in Mother Goose. ~ Clarence Darrow

You can only be free if I am free. ~ Clarence Darrow

Eugene V. Debs has always been one of my heroes. ~ Clarence Darrow

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

Scopes isn't on trial; civilization is on trial. ~ Clarence Darrow

The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice. ~ Clarence Darrow

Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for. ~ Clarence Darrow

The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. ~ Clarence Darrow

Lawyers are natural politicians. ~ Clarence Darrow

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

Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow ... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy. ~ Kevin Spacey

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause. ~ Clarence Darrow

This is life and all there is of life; to play the game, to play the cards we get; play them uncomplainingly and play them to the end. the playing of the game is the foregetting of self and play it bravely to the end ~ Clarence Darrow

Working people have alot of bad habits, but the worst of these is work. ~ Clarence Darrow

I am an agnostic as to the question of God. ~ Clarence Darrow

Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism. ~ Clarence Darrow

A criminal is someone without the capital to incorporate ~ Clarence Darrow

The truth is always modern and there never comes a time when it is safe to give it voice. ~ Clarence Darrow

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

This play is dedicated to the memory of Clarence Darrow, The Great Defender, whose mental frontiers were the four corners of the sky. ~ Tennessee Williams

It does not make much difference what kind of a law we make as long as the judges tell us what it means. ~ Clarence Darrow

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. ~ Clarence Darrow

The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime. ~ Clarence Darrow

In order to have enough freedom, it is necessary to have too much. ~ Clarence Darrow

I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom. ~ Clarence Darrow