“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)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can mak…" by Clarence Darrow?
Clarence Darrow photo
Clarence Darrow 70
American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Li… 1857–1938

Related quotes

Ram Dass photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Ammar Nakshawani photo

“Sunni and Shia are the main schools in Islam, like Protestant and Catholic. … When you debate with the other school you don’t use vile language or other terms against their respective leaders.”

Ammar Nakshawani (1981) Islamic lecturer

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

Swami Vivekananda photo
Jeffrey R. Holland photo
Jerry Coyne photo

““Where are You?” can be both a protest against a problem and a search for understanding and perspective.”

John Townsend (1952) Canadian clinical psychologist and author

Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)

Aaron Burr photo

“There is a maxim, 'Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.' It is a maxim for sluggards. A better reading of it is, 'Never do today what you can as well do tomorrow,' because something may occur to make you regret your premature action.”

Aaron Burr (1756–1836) American Vice President and politician

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.

Michael Swanwick photo
Gregory Colbert photo

“I spent all my time at school in the library. Bad teachers can teach you to learn on your own.”

Gregory Colbert (1960) Canadian photographer

"Dances With Whales" by Alan Riding in The New York Times (22 April 2002)

Related topics