Clarence Darrow Quotes

116 Sourced Quotes

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
Criminal cases receive the attention of the press. The cruel and disagreeable things of life are more apt to get the newspaper space than the pleasant ones. It must be that most people enjoy hearing of and reading about the troubles of others. Perhaps men unconsciously feel that they rise in the general level as others go down.

Clarence Darrow
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
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
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.

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

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

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

Clarence Darrow
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
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.

Clarence Darrow
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.

Clarence Darrow
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.

Clarence Darrow
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.

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

Clarence Darrow
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.

Clarence Darrow