"If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Activists from the United StatesLawyers from the United StatesLawyers from IllinoisNon-fiction authors from the United StatesPeople from Ohio
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (13 July 1925)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Clarence_Darrow
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow (18 April 1857 β 13 March 1938) was an American lawyer, most famous for having defended teenaged thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14 year old Bobby Franks (1924), and for defending John T. Scopes in the so-called "Monkey" Trial (1925), opposing William Jennings Bryan.
69 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Clarence Darrow β
Related Quotes
"Whichever way man may look upon the earth, he is oppressed with the suffering incident to life. It would almost seem β¦"
"Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing fβ¦"
"All men do the best they can. But none meet life honestly and few heroically."
"Man does not live by truth, but by the illusions that his brain conceives."
"It is often said that the accused should be given an immediate trial; that this and subsequent proceedings should notβ¦"
"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where manyβ¦"
"With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.β¦"
"The purpose of life is living. Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives. The smallest, tiniest iβ¦"
"I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose."
"In the great flood of human life that is spawned upon the earth, it is not often that a man is born."