Clarence Darrow
Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they are meant to serve.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Men
The man who fights for his fellow-man is a better man than the one who fights for himself.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Peace
The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.Collection: Comfort
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.Collection: Believe
Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.Collection: Wrecks
The purpose of life is living. Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Sleep
Hoover, if elected, will do one thing that is almost incomprehensible to the human mind: he will make a great man out of Coolidge.Collection: Funny
People in this world are not often logical.Collection: People
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Government
Every thought of pity is like the balm of Gilead to our souls.Collection: Soul
The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor's heart - and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word.Collection: War
The law is a horrible business.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Believe
Sympathy is the child of imaginationCollection: Children
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Strong
I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man -- public opinion.Collection: Lonely
Some false representations contravene the law; some do not. ... The sensibilities of no two men are the same. Some would refuse to sell property without carefully explaining all about its merits and defects, and putting themselves in the purchasers' place and inquiring if he himself would buy under the circumstances. But such men never would be prosperous merchants.Collection: Men
If there is a soul, what is it, and where did it come from, and where does it go? Can anyone who is guided by his reason possibly imagine a soul independent of a body, or the place of its residence, or the character of it, or anything concerning it? If man is justified in any belief or disbelief on any subject, he is warranted in the disbelief in a soul. Not one scrap of evidence exists to prove any such impossible thing.Collection: Character
Justice must take account of infinite circumstances which a human being cannot understand.Collection: Justice
No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism.Collection: Criticism
The ablest lawyers are always associated with the biggest fees.Collection: Lawyer
Everything serious that he says is a joke and everything humorous that he says is dead serious.Collection: Humorous
Religious doctrines do not and clearly cannot be adopted as the criminal code of a state.Collection: Religious
Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial.Collection: Civilization
The difference between the child and the man lies chiefly in the unlimited confidence and buoyancy of youth.Collection: Children
It is bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins.Collection: School
In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If 'natural rights' means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Kindness
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 newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men.Collection: Book
Lawyers are natural politicians.Collection: Lawyer
A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.Collection: Mind
The truth is, no man is white and no man is black. We are all freckled.Collection: Men
The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truthCollection: Future
Religion is based on the insistence that over and above all is a purpose and a guiding hand that is beneficent and kind, and would not leave a hair unnumbered or let a sparrow fall unnoticed to the ground. Those who cherish such hallucinations forget that the all-loving power is inflicting tuberculosis, cancer, famine, and pestilence on the trusting, simple sons of men.Collection: God
Do you think you can cure the hatreds and the maladjustments of the world by hanging them? You simply show your ignorance and your hate when you say it. You may here and there cure hatred with love and understanding, but you can only add fuel to the flames by cruelty and hate.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Men
Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.Collection: Men
Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man's origin, capacity and responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
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.Collection: Children
The audience that storms the box-office of the theater to gain entrance to a sensational show is small and sleepy compared with the throng that crashes the courthouse door when something concerning real life and death is to be laid bare to the public.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Men