Clarence Darrow Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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. — Clarence Darrow

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. — Clarence Darrow

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

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. I'm beginning to believe it. — Clarence Darrow

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

The law is a horrible business. — Clarence Darrow

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. — Clarence Darrow

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

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

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

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

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. — Clarence Darrow

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

People in this world are not often logical. — Clarence Darrow

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

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. — 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

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. — Clarence Darrow

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

History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history. — Clarence Darrow

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

Sympathy is the child of imagination — 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 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

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

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

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. — Clarence Darrow

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

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

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

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

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. — Clarence Darrow

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

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

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

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. — 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

Your book, 'The Tyranny of God,' is well done. It is a very clear statement of the question, bold and true beyond dispute. I am glad that you wrote it. It is as plain as the multiplication table, which doesn't mean that everyone will believe it. I thank you for writing it. I wish I were the author.

{Preface to 'The Tyranny of God by Joseph Lewis} — Clarence Darrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is a never-ending school, and the really important lessons all tend to teach humanity our proper relation to the environment where we must live. — Clarence Darrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

No law was ever made by the people; they are made for the people — Clarence Darrow

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. — Clarence Darrow

When they want a working man for anything excepting work they want him for conspiracy. — 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 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

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. — Clarence Darrow

To think is to differ. — Clarence Darrow

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

Most jury trials are contests between the rich and poor. — Clarence Darrow

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

Lawyers are natural politicians. — Clarence Darrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Clarence Darrow

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

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

Whenever I hear people discussing birth control, I always remember that I was fifth. — Clarence Darrow

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. — 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

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. — Clarence Darrow

To know all is to understand all, and this leaves no room for judgement and condemnation. — 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

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. — Clarence Darrow

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

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

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. — Clarence Darrow

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

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

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