Clarence Seward Darrow (1857–1938) was an American criminal defense lawyer, orator, and writer. An advocate of progressive reforms and an opponent of the death penalty, he used the platform of a courtroom for ironic and eloquent lines of reasoning to persuade not only the jury but also the American public.
Born in Kinsman, Ohio, Darrow was admitted to the Bar in 1878. From 1898–1911, Darrow devoted himself to defending organized labor in a series of criminal cases throughout the United States.
Darrow served as the defense counsel in several well-publicized trials, including the famous 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” where a high-school biology teacher was charged with violating a Tennessee state law forbidding the teaching of evolution in public schools.
In 1934, Darrow was appointed to investigate Senator Gerald Nye’s charge that the codes introduced by the National Recovery Board were favoring monopolies. His report led eventually to the abolition of price control in the United States.
Darrow’s works include the literary essays A Persian Pearl (1898,) the novels Farmington (1904,) An Eye for an Eye (1905,) and Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1922.) His biography is The Story of My Life (1932,) and his thirteen famous speeches are collected in Attorney for the Damned (1957.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Clarence Darrow
At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can’t.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Revolution, Aging, Age
The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Parents
True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Patriotism
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Doubt
With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.
—Clarence Darrow
No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.
—Clarence Darrow
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
Topics: Business
There is no such thing as justice–in or out of court.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Justice
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Language
If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.
—Clarence Darrow
Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.
—Clarence Darrow
To think is to differ.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Thinking
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Society, Justice, Liberty, Freedom
The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Future
I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Atheism
The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.
—Clarence Darrow
I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Dying, Nature, Death
The pursuit of truth shall set you free – even if you never catch up with it.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Truth
Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes has burned into the victim’s heart, he will know no other smile but hers.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Liberty
In a terrible crisis there is only one element more helpless than the poor, and that is the rich.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Poverty
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
Topics: Bravery, Idleness
Chase after the truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Thought, Truth
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Government
Physical deformity, calls forth our charity. But the infinite misfortune of moral deformity calls forth nothing but hatred and vengeance.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Morals
He’s the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth, Vermont. On Calvin Coolidge
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they are meant to serve.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Laws
There is no such thing as justice – in or out of court.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Justice
If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Thinking, Laughter
As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.
—Clarence Darrow
I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend, than be one.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Work
The trouble with law is lawyers.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Lawyers
I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
—Clarence Darrow
Topics: Murder
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