Clarence Darrow Quotes

Sympathy is the child of imagination

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

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

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.

None meet life honestly and few heroically.

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

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.

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

Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man's origin, capacity and responsibility.

The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.

Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial.

If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.

The truth is, no man is white and no man is black. We are all freckled.

A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.

The law is a horrible business.

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

I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man -- public opinion.

Religious doctrines do not and clearly cannot be adopted as the criminal code of a state.

Punishment as punishment is not admissible unless the offender has had the freewill to select his course.

I am an agnostic as to the question of God.

Hoover, if elected, will do one thing that is almost incomprehensible to the human mind: he will make a great man out of Coolidge.

Everything serious that he says is a joke and everything humorous that he says is dead serious.

I go to a better tailor than any of you and pay more for my clothes. The only difference is that you probably don't sleep in yours.

The ablest lawyers are always associated with the biggest fees.

Great wealth often curses all who touch it.

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.

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

The purpose of man is like the purpose of a pollywog - to wiggle along as far as he can without dying; or, to hang to life until death takes him.

One believes in the truthfulness of a man because of his long experience with the man, and because the man has always told a consistent story. But no man has told so consistent a story as nature.

People in this world are not often logical.

The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth

A jury is more apt to be unbiased and independent than a court, but they very seldom stand up against strong public clamor. Judges naturally believe the defendant is guilty.

Every thought of pity is like the balm of Gilead to our souls.

In the great flood of human life that is spawned upon the earth, it is not often that a man is born.

I cannot tell and I shall never know how many words of mine might have given birth to cruelty in place of love and kindness and charity.

Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.

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

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.

I believe that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either. I don't believe in God as I don’t believe in Mother Goose.

If every man who passed an unjust judgment on his fellow should be condemned, how many judges would be found so vain and foolish as to review and condemn their Maker’s work?

[George Everett Macdonald was] a valiant soldier for human liberty.

I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.

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

Getting married is a good deal like going to a restaurant with your friends. You order what you want and then when you see what the other fellow got you wish you had taken that.

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history.

The pursuit of truth will set you free even if you never catch up with it.

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

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