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Clarence Darrow: 140 quotes3 likes

“I was truly sorry for Mr. Bryan. But I consoled myself by thinking of the years through which he had busied himself tormenting intelligent professors with impudent questions about their faith, and seeking to arouse the ignoramuses and bigots to drive them out of their positions.”

Clarence Darrow

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), p. 267

“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

As quoted in a eulogy for Darrow by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1938)

“That men should ‘turn the other cheek,’ should ‘love their enemies,’ should ‘resist not evil,’ has ever seemed fine to teach to children, to preach on Sundays, to round a period in a senseless oratorical flight; but it has been taken for granted that these sentiments cannot furnish the real foundation for strong characters or great states. p. 13”

Clarence Darrow

Resist Not Evil (1904)

“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 a 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

Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (13 July 1925)

“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 no longer cure disease by casting out devils.”

Clarence Darrow

Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)

“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

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), Ch. 1 "Before The Beginning"

“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

As quoted in a eulogy for Darrow http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/darrow1.htm by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1938)

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

Clarence Darrow

As quoted in Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do" by Peter McWilliams, from 2000 Years of Disbelief (1996) edited by James A Haught p. 817

“In Geneva lived Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He too was a rebel, mighty in war. Voltaire was keener, wittier, deeper, greater. Rousseau was more fiery, emotional, passionate. Both were really warriors in the same great cause. From their different places, three miles apart, both sent forth their thunderbolts to wake a sleeping world. When the world awakened and shook itself, churches, thrones, institutions, laws, and customs were buried in the wreck. Some charged the wreck to Voltaire, some to Rousseau.”

Clarence Darrow

Voltaire (1916)

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.”

Clarence Darrow

As quoted in Improving the Quality of Life for the Black Elderly: Challenges and Opportunities : Hearing before the Select Committee on Aging, House of Representatives, One Hundredth Congress, first session, September 25, 1987 (1988)
This quote's earliest known source is from Leon C. Megginson (see Charles Darwin)
Misattributed

“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.”

Clarence Darrow

Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)

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

Clarence Darrow

Funeral oration for John Peter Altgeld (14 March 1902); published in an appendix to The Story of My Life (1932)

“Whatever else he was during his life, he was never dull, and the world forgives almost anything but stupidity.”

Clarence Darrow

Voltaire (1916)

“Pensions are the favors of the powerful, and dangerous to any great intellect. It is only here and there down throughout the ages that a Voltaire is born who does not fall a victim to their blandishments.”

Clarence Darrow

Voltaire (1916)

“To disband the armies and destroy the forts, to diffuse love and brotherhood, and peace and justice in the place of war and strife, could tend only to the buidling up of character, the elevation of the soul, and the strength and well-being of the state.”

Clarence Darrow

Source: Resist Not Evil (1904), p. 39

“When Voltaire was bornreally but one church which, of course, was ignorant, tyrannical and barbarous in the extreme. All creeds are alike, and whenever there is but one, and the rulers honestly believe in that one, they are bound to be ignorant, barbarous and cruel. All sorts of heresies were punishable by death. If anyone dared to write a pamphlet or book that questioned any part of the accepted faith, the book was at once consigned to flames and the author was lucky if he did not meet the same fate. Religion was not maintained by the precepts of the priest, but by the prison, the torture chamber and the fagot. Everyone believed; no one questioned. The religious creeds, while strict and barbarous, did not interfere with the personal conduct of any of the rulers. They were left free to act as they pleased, so long as they professed to believe in the prevailing faith.”

Clarence Darrow

Voltaire (1916)

“Judge: Do you want Mr. Bryan sworn?”

Clarence Darrow

Scopes Trial (1925)

“All men do the best they can. But none meet life honestly and few heroically.”

Clarence Darrow

As quoted in Infidels and Heretics : An Agnostic's Anthology (1929) edited by Clarence Darrow and Wallace Rice, p. 206

“There are two things that kill a genius — a fatal disease and contentment. When a man is contented he goes to sleep. Voltaire had no chance to be contented, and so he wrote eternally and unceasingly, more than any other man in the history of the world.”

Clarence Darrow

Voltaire (1916)

“Hell, that's why they make erasers.”

Clarence Darrow

On mistakes, reported in Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense (1941), p. 75