150 Quotes by Clarence Darrow

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom.

I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.

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

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.

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.

A criminal is someone without the capital to incorporate

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I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by, reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

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.

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.

Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

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

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

It must always be remembered that all laws are naturally and inevitably evolved by the strongest force in a community, and in the last analysis made for the protection of the dominant class.

The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.

Anyone can spot a lie, unless he is in need of that lie.

We are born and we die; and between these two most important events in our lives more or less time elapses which we have to waste somehow or other. In the end it does not seem to matter much whether we have done so in making money, or practicing law, or reading or playing, or in any other way, as long as we felt we were deriving a maximum of happiness out of our doings.

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

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.

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

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

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.

With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men.

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

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

The man who fights for his fellow-man is a better man than the one who fights for himself.

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

I do not believe in god because I do not believe in Mother Goose.

The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything.

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

An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.

Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.

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

You can only be free if I am free.

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.

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

The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.

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

Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.

Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.

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

I had a vivid imagination. Not only could I put myself in the other person's place, but I could not avoid doing so. My sympathies always went out to the weak, the suffering, and the poor. Realizing their sorrows I tried to relieve them in order that I myself might be relieved.

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

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

Chase after the truth like all hell.

The purpose of life is to live it.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

I am sure of very little, and I shouldn't be surprised if those things were wrong.

Never forget, almost every case has been won or lost when the jury is sworn.

Do I need to argue to Your Honor that cruelty only breeds cruelty? That hatred only causes hatred; that if there is any way to soften this human heart which is hard enough at its best, if there is any way to kill evil and hatred and all that goes with it, it is not through evil and hatred and cruelty; it is through charity, and love, and understanding?

The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.

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.

To think is to differ.

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.

Education was in danger from the source that always hampered it—religious fanaticism.

Physical deformity, calls forth our charity. But the infinite misfortune of moral deformity calls forth nothing but hatred and vengeance.

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

Eugene V. Debs has always been one of my heroes.

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.

Chloroform unfit children. Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.

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

Most jury trials are contests between the rich and poor.

Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they are meant to serve.

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.

For to know all is to understand all, and this leaves no room for judgment and condemnation.

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.

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

The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery.

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.

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing from him who will not give her all. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers.

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

We're all killers at heart. I have never taken anybody's life, but I have often read obituary notices with considerable satisfaction.

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

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

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.

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

Different strokes for different folks.

No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism.

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man.

"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."

There is a soul of truth in error; there is a soul of good in evil.

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

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.

The purpose of life is living. Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives.

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

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.

Justice must take account of infinite circumstances which a human being cannot understand.

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

Those who enjoy the emotion of hating are much like the groups who sate their thirst for blood by hunting and hounding to death helpless animals as an outlet for their emotions.

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.

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.

If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.

We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.

Religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either.

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

Men have always been obliged to fight to preserve liberty. Constitutions and laws do not safeguard liberty. It can be preserved only by a tolerant people, and this means eternal conflict.

The consideration and kindness shown by unfortunates to each other are surprising to those who have no experience with this class of men. Often to find real sympathy you must go to those who know what misery means.

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.

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

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

Lawyers are natural politicians.

Depressions may bring people closer to the church but so do funerals.

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.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike someone they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

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

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.

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.

None meet life honestly and few heroically.

In life one cannot eat his cake and have it, too; he must make his choice and then do the best he can to be content to go the way his judgment leads.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Hoover, if elected, will do one thing that is almost incomprehensible to the human mind: he will make a great man out of Coolidge.

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

Some false representations contravene the law; some do not. ... The sensibilities of no two men are the same. Some would refuse to sell property without carefully explaining all about its merits and defects, and putting themselves in the purchasers' place and inquiring if he himself would buy under the circumstances. But such men never would be prosperous merchants.

The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.

"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"

The law is a horrible business.

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.

Sympathy is the child of imagination

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

Religious doctrines do not and clearly cannot be adopted as the criminal code of a state.

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.

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

Great wealth often curses all who touch it.

Some false representations contravene the law; some do not. The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business, and, besides, could not be done. The line between honesty and dishonesty is a narrow, shifting one and usually lets those get by that are the most subtle and already have more than they can use.

Life is a never-ending school, and the really important lessons all tend to teach man his proper relation to the environment where he must live.

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths.

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.

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.

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.

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

Any one who thinks is an agnostic about something, otherwise he must believe that he is possessed of all knowledge. And the proper place for such a person is in the madhouse or the home for the feeble-minded.

"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."

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.

People in this world are not often logical.

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.

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

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.