“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.”
Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (13 July 1925)
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Clarence Darrow 70
American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Li… 1857–1938Related quotes

“Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.”

On Islamic unity, in the Daily Mail (5 July 2013) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2357021/The-hate-sheikh-Home-Counties-Firebrand-cleric-fuelling-global-conflict-Muslims-sets-HQ-idyllic-village.html

" Theology schools are dying https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/03/19/theology-schools-are-dying/" March 19, 2016
Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)

Reported in Marshall Brown, Wit and Humor of Bench and Bar (1899), p. 67. Alternately reported as "Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done", reported in Jacob Morton Braude, The Complete Art of Public Speaking (1970), p. 84.

“I spent all my time at school in the library. Bad teachers can teach you to learn on your own.”
"Dances With Whales" by Alan Riding in The New York Times (22 April 2002)