“Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his question. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world. I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee to slur at it, and while it will require time, I am willing to take it.”
Scopes Trial (1925), Day 7
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William Jennings Bryan 33
United States Secretary of State 1860–1925Related quotes
“The Field of Vision” p. 243 (originally published in Galaxy, October 1973)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)
Liner notes for Live in Japan. Impulse. GRD-4-102, 1991.
“I am told, in a dream … you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream.”
Speaking of a dream not fully remembered, in Fragments of a Journal (1966)
Context: I am told, in a dream... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.
47 : The Question and its Answer, p. 78.
The Everything and the Nothing (1963)
1940s, Philosophy for Laymen (1946)
Context: There are a number of purely theoretical questions, of perennial and passionate interest, which science is unable to answer, at any rate at present. Do we survive death in any sense, and if so, do we survive for a time or for ever? Can mind dominate matter, or does matter completely dominate mind, or has each, perhaps, a certain limited independence? Has the universe a purpose? Or is it driven by blind necessity? Or is it a mere chaos and jumble, in which the natural laws that we think we find are only a phantasy generated by our own love of order? If there is a cosmic scheme, has life more importance in it than astronomy would lead us to suppose, or is our emphasis upon life mere parochialism and self-importance? I do not know the answer to these questions, and I do not believe that anybody else does, but I think human life would be impoverished if they were forgotten, or if definite answers were accepted without adequate evidence. To keep alive the interest in such questions, and to scrutinize suggested answers, is one of the functions of philosophy.
