Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrowwas an American lawyer, leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform. He was best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks. Some of his other notable cases included defending Ossian Sweet, and John T. Scopes in the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, in which he opposed William Jennings Bryan. Called a "sophisticated country lawyer", he remains notable for his wit, which...
ProfessionLawyer
Date of Birth18 April 1857
CityKinsman, OH
Sympathy is the child of imagination
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only real lawyers are trial lawyers, and trial lawyers try cases to juries.
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
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.
We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.
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.
If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.
The truth is, no man is white and no man is black. We are all freckled.
Wars always bring about a conservative reaction. They overwhelm and destroy patient and careful efforts to improve the condition of man.
The purpose of life is living. Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives.