Top 100 Darrow Clarence Quotes
#1. History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history.
Clarence Darrow
#2. [George Everett Macdonald was] a valiant soldier for human liberty.
Clarence Darrow
#3. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#4. Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.
Clarence Darrow
#5. Everyone is the heir to all that has gone before; his structure and emotional life is fixed, and no two children of nature have the same heredity. I believe everyone should and must live out what is in him. So no two lives can be the same.
Clarence Darrow
#6. This is life and all there is of life; to play the game, to play the cards we get; play them uncomplainingly and play them to the end. the playing of the game is the foregetting of self and play it bravely to the end
Clarence Darrow
#7. The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isn't really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.
Barry Eisler
#8. Life is a never-ending school, and the really important lessons all tend to teach humanity our proper relation to the environment where we must live.
Clarence Darrow
#9. The really intelligent are as abnormal as the defective. The great masses of men are rather mediocre, and those above and below are exceptions.
Clarence Darrow
#10. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#11. The difference between the child and the man lies chiefly in the unlimited confidence and buoyancy of youth.
Clarence Darrow
#12. A criminal is someone without the capital to incorporate
Clarence Darrow
#13. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#14. We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.
Clarence Darrow
#16. The purpose of life is living. Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives.
Clarence Darrow
#17. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#18. Instead of yielding to idle conversation it might profit one to cultivate silence and contemplation.
Clarence Darrow
#19. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#20. Chloroform unfit children. Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.
Clarence Darrow
#21. Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow ... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.
Kevin Spacey
#22. It is bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins.
Clarence Darrow
#23. No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.
Clarence Darrow
#24. Everything serious that he says is a joke and everything humorous that he says is dead serious.
Clarence Darrow
#25. Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.
Clarence Darrow
#26. Punishment as punishment is not admissible unless the offender has had the free will to select his course.
Clarence Darrow
#27. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#29. You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
Clarence Darrow
#30. My constitution was destroyed long ago; now I am living under the bylaws.
Clarence Darrow
#34. I am simply an agnostic. I haven't yet had time or opportunity to explore the universe, and I don't know what I might run on to in some nook or corner.
Clarence Darrow
#35. The man who fights for his fellow-man is a better man than the one who fights for himself.
Clarence Darrow
#36. Everybody is a potential murderer. I've never killed anyone, but I frequently get satisfaction reading the obituary notices.
Clarence Darrow
#37. One cannot live through a long stretch of years without forming some philosophy of life.
Clarence Darrow
#38. Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.
Clarence Darrow
#39. True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.
Clarence Darrow
#40. I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
Clarence Darrow
#41. In the great flood of human life that is spawned upon the earth, it is not often that a man is born.
Clarence Darrow
#42. I am sure of very little, and I shouldn't be surprised if those things were wrong.
Clarence Darrow
#43. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#44. Every thought of pity is like the balm of Gilead to our souls.
Clarence Darrow
#45. When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. I'm beginning to believe it.
Clarence Darrow
#46. History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.
Clarence Darrow
#47. No law was ever made by the people; they are made for the people
Clarence Darrow
#48. The truth is, no man is white and no man is black. We are all freckled.
Clarence Darrow
#49. Justice must take account of infinite circumstances which a human being cannot understand.
Clarence Darrow
#50. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#51. Religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either.
Clarence Darrow
#52. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#53. It is just as often a great misfortune to be the child of the rich as it is to be the child of the poor. Wealth has its misfortunes. Too much, too great opportunity and advantage given to a child has its misfortunes.
Clarence Darrow
#55. The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth
Clarence Darrow
#56. I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend, than be one.
Clarence Darrow
#57. I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#58. No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism.
Clarence Darrow
#59. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#60. I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Clarence Darrow
#61. It is not for the world to judge, but to crown them all alike. Each and all lived out their own being, did their work in their own way, and carried a reluctant, stupid humanity to greater
possibilities and grander heights.
Clarence Darrow
#62. Never forget, almost every case has been won or lost when the jury is sworn.
Clarence Darrow
#63. Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought - even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth.
Clarence Darrow
#64. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.
Clarence Darrow
#65. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#66. I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.
Clarence Darrow
#68. If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.
Clarence Darrow
#70. Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.
Clarence Darrow
#71. Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.
Clarence Darrow
#72. To know all is to understand all, and this leaves no room for judgement and condemnation.
Clarence Darrow
#74. The truth is that brains have little to do with either the making or accumulating of money.
Clarence Darrow
#75. The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.
H.L. Mencken
#76. I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.
Clarence Darrow
#77. Education was in danger from the source that always hampered it - religious fanaticism.
Clarence Darrow
#78. As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and if no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.
Clarence Darrow
#79. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#80. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#81. I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man
public opinion.
Clarence Darrow
#82. Most jury trials are contests between the rich and poor.
Clarence Darrow
#83. There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.
Clarence Darrow
#85. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#86. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.
Clarence Darrow
#87. Money has been the most serious handicap that we have ever met. There are times when poverty is fortunate
Clarence Darrow
#89. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#90. A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.
Clarence Darrow
#91. The nation that would to-day disarm its soldiers and turn its people to the paths of peace would accomplish more to its building up than by all the war taxes wrong from its hostile and
unwilling serfs
Clarence Darrow
#93. 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.
Clarence Darrow
#94. Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man's origin, capacity and responsibility.
Clarence Darrow
#96. I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose.
Clarence Darrow
#97. Henry Lloyd was with Darrow when they toured the mine. It was a dreadful experience, Lloyd said, "like a foretaste of the inferno."
"You might as well get used to it," Darrow told him. Heaven was reserved for Wall Street financiers. Infidels like themselves would be rooming with Satan.
John A. Farrell
#98. Any one who thinks is an agnostic about something, otherwise he must believe that he is possessed of all knowledge. And the proper place for such a person is in the madhouse or the home for the feeble-minded.
Clarence Darrow
#99. I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it.
Clarence Darrow
#100. 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.
Clarence Darrow
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