“Nothing was to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.”

“Adam and Eve are historical persons created by god in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life-forms.”

“With the death of Clarence Darrow in 1938, American public life lost the last well-known secularist crusader who stood squarely in the enlightenment freethought tradition of Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll.”

— Susan Jacoby (2004), Freethinkers: a History of American Secularism [6]

“Nature is strong and she is pitiless. We are her victims. Each act, criminal or otherwise, follows a cause; give the same conditions, the same result will follow forever and ever.”

— Clarence Darrow (1924), “Closing Argument”, said to jury in Leopold and Loeb trial [4]

“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.”

— Clarence Darrow (1925), Court room argument at Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee, Jul 13 (Ѻ) (vid at 37:17)

“Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man.”

— Clarence Darrow (c.1925)

“I didn’t choose to be born, and if I’d been given the option, I’d have asked to been let off.”

— Clarence Darrow (c.1925), Scopes Monkey Trial documentary (18:25-18:44)

“Chase after truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails.”

— Clarence Darrow (c.1925) (Ѻ)

“I am agnostic as to the question of god. Since man ceased to worship openly an anthropomorphic god and talked vaguely and not intelligently about ‘some force’ in the universe, higher than man (see: higher force; higher power), that is responsible for the existence of man and the universe, he cannot be said to believe in god. One cannot believe in a force excepting as a force that pervades matter and is not an individual entity.”

— Clarence Darrow (1929), “Why I Am Agnostic” [3]

“The number of people on the borderline of insanity in a big country is simply appalling, and these seem especially addicted to believing themselves, saviors, and prophets. It only takes a slight stimulus to throw them entirely off their balance.”

— Clarence Darrow (1932), The Story of My Life [5]