Quotes from Clarence Darrow

No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.

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 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.

All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike someone they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I do not believe in god because I do not believe in Mother Goose.

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

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

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

I am an agnostic as to the question of God.

It's not bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel- he believes in punishment.

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.

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

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

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

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