Top 186 Quotes & Sayings by Clarence Darrow - Page 2

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

Chase after the truth like all hell.

...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.

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.

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.

Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.

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

The purpose of life is to live it.

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

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Most jury trials are contests between the rich and poor.

Great wealth often curses all who touch 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.