Clarence darrow quotes

I have lived my life, and I have fought my battles, not against the weak and the poor - anybody can do that - but against power, against injustice, against oppression, and I have asked no odds from them, and I never shall.

Some false representations contravene the law; some do not. The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business, and, besides, could not be done. The line between honesty and dishonesty is a narrow, shifting one and usually lets those get by that are the most subtle and already have more than they can use.

Great wealth often curses all who touch it.

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

Life is a never-ending school, and the really important lessons all tend to teach man his proper relation to the environment where he must live.

Different strokes for different folks.

Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas.

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

...finally men were saved only through God's son dying for them, and that unless human beings believed this silly, impossible and wicked story they were doomed to hell? Can anyone with intelligence really believe that a child born today should be doomed because the snake tempted Eve and Eve tempted Adam? To believe that is not God-worship; it is devil-worship.

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

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.

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.

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

There are two things that kill a genius - a fatal disease and contentment.

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

Cheating, having 'hoes,' none of that is cute. To be honest, it's really immature. I don't see how people take pride in breaking someone's heart. The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery.

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means.

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths.

There is a soul of truth in error; there is a soul of good in evil.

With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men.

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.

In order to have enough freedom, it is necessary to have too much.

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.

Chase after the truth like all hell.

I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

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

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

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause . . . True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one's purpose, and the sufficiency of one's own approval as a justification for one's own acts.

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

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

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

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom.

In life one cannot eat his cake and have it, too; he must make his choice and then do the best he can to be content to go the way his judgment leads.

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

The efforts of the medical profession in the US to control:...its...job it proposes to monopolize. It has been carrying on a vigorous campaign all over the country against new methods and schools of healing because it wants the business...I have watched this medical profession for a long time and it bears watching.

Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document?

The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime.

To think is to differ.

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

It must always be remembered that all laws are naturally and inevitably evolved by the strongest force in a community, and in the last analysis made for the protection of the dominant class.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

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.

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

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

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man.

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing from him who will not give her all. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers.

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.

If a man really has charge of his destiny at all, he should have something to say about getting born; and I only came through by a hair's-breadth. What had I to do with this momentous first step? In the language of the lawyer, I was not even a party of the second part.

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.

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.

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

A criminal is someone without the capital to incorporate

When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.

For to know all is to understand all, and this leaves no room for judgment and condemnation.

An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.

Do I need to argue to Your Honor that cruelty only breeds cruelty? That hatred only causes hatred; that if there is any way to soften this human heart which is hard enough at its best, if there is any way to kill evil and hatred and all that goes with it, it is not through evil and hatred and cruelty; it is through charity, and love, and understanding?

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

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.

Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.

Instead of yielding to idle conversation it might profit one to cultivate silence and contemplation.

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.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.

The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.

The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.

It may never come, but I fancy than no man who has sympathy for the human race does not wish that sometime those who labor should have the whole product of their toil. Probably it will never come, but I wish that the time might come when men who work in the industries would own the industries.

No nation can be really great that is held together by Gatling guns, and no true loyalty can be induced and kept through fear.

Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause.

I am sure of very little, and I shouldn't be surprised if those things were wrong.

I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend, than be one.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You can only be free if I am free.

Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.

Eugene V. Debs has always been one of my heroes.

All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike someone they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

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

The really intelligent are as abnormal as the defective. The great masses of men are rather mediocre, and those above and below are exceptions.

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.

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

Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.

We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.

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

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.

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

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

Justice has nothing to do with what goes on in a courtroom; Justice is what comes out of a courtroom

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.

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.

Most jury trials are contests between the rich and poor.

The purpose of life is to live it.

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.

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

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

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

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.

There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.

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.

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.

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.

One cannot live through a long stretch of years without forming some philosophy of life.

The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything.

The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

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

I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.

None meet life honestly and few heroically.

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

To say that the universe was here last year, or millions of years ago, does not explain its origin. This is still a mystery. As to the question of the origin of things, man can only wonder and doubt and guess.

To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.

We are born and we die; and between these two most important events in our lives more or less time elapses which we have to waste somehow or other. In the end it does not seem to matter much whether we have done so in making money, or practicing law, or reading or playing, or in any other way, as long as we felt we were deriving a maximum of happiness out of our doings.

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.

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.

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

I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by, reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

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

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

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

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.

There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.