Top 160 Clarence Darrow Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Whenever I hear people discussing birth control, I always remember that I was fifth.”

— Clarence Darrow

102. “Great wealth often curses all who touch it.”

— Clarence Darrow

103. “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

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

— Clarence Darrow

105. “It may never come, but I fancy than no man who has sympathy for the human race does not wish that sometime those who labor should have the whole product of their toil. Probably it will never come, but I wish that the time might come when men who work in the industries would own the industries.”

— Clarence Darrow

106. “The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom.”

— Clarence Darrow

107. “Anyone can spot a lie, unless he is in need of that lie.”

— Clarence Darrow

108. “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

109. “There are two things that kill a genius: a fatal disease and contentment.”

— Clarence Darrow

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

— Clarence Darrow

111. “Education was in danger from the source that always hampered it – religious fanaticism.”

— Clarence Darrow

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

— Clarence Darrow

113. “Calvin Coolidge was the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont.”

— Clarence Darrow

114. “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.”

— Clarence Darrow

115. “Depressions may bring people closer to the church but so do funerals.”

— Clarence Darrow

116. “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.”

— Clarence Darrow

117. “Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas.”

— Clarence Darrow

118. “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

119. “It is bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins.”

— Clarence Darrow

120. “Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.”

— Clarence Darrow

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

— Clarence Darrow

122. “Most jury trials are contests between the rich and poor.”

— Clarence Darrow

123. “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.”

— Clarence Darrow

124. “Justice must take account of infinite circumstances which a human being cannot understand.”

— Clarence Darrow

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

— Clarence Darrow

126. “Eugene V. Debs has always been one of my heroes.”

— Clarence Darrow

127. “The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.”

— Clarence Darrow

128. “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

129. “None meet life honestly and few heroically.”

— Clarence Darrow

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

— Clarence Darrow

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

— Clarence Darrow

132. “I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

— Clarence Darrow

133. “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

134. “In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality.”

— Clarence Darrow

135. “People in this world are not often logical.”

— Clarence Darrow

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

— Clarence Darrow

137. “When they want a working man for anything excepting work they want him for conspiracy.”

— Clarence Darrow

138. “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

139. “I am sure of very little, and I shouldn’t be surprised if those things were wrong.”

— Clarence Darrow

140. “A criminal is someone without the capital to incorporate.”

— Clarence Darrow

141. “My constitution was destroyed long ago; now I am living under the bylaws.”

— Clarence Darrow

142. “In order to have enough freedom, it is necessary to have too much.”

— Clarence Darrow

143. “No law was ever made by the people; they are made for the people.”

— Clarence Darrow

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

— Clarence Darrow

145. “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.”

— Clarence Darrow

146. “You can’t get to a pleasant place to be at unless you use pleasant methods to get there. When you are dealing with a human society the means is fully as important as the end.”

— Clarence Darrow

147. “The difference between the child and the man lies chiefly in the unlimited confidence and buoyancy of youth.”

— Clarence Darrow

148. “Sympathy is the child of imagination.”

— Clarence Darrow

149. “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

150. “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.”

— Clarence Darrow