Clarence Darrow Quotes

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires.

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

Men are naturally barbarians, and that will remain forever. The passion, the love, and the lust is intensifying with time.

I joke, but I'm sort of serious: I've always wanted to get into a fight. I know that sounds horrible, but I always had the desire to see what it's like.

There are people who just love to destroy other people. It saddens me to admit that, I think, at whatever state of human civilisation we arrive at, the will to destroy other people is something that is innate in some people.

Mankind, by the perverse depravity of their nature, esteem that which they have most desired as of no value the moment it is possessed, and torment themselves with fruitless wishes for that which is beyond their reach.

No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.

We are the total of our longings.

The significance of a man is not in what he attains, but rather what he longs to attain.

Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.

A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

We all come from different levels, and I think every human has their own relationship to violence, athletic violence and fighting.

All men desire by nature to know.

Natural freedoms are but just: There's something generous in mere lust.

I have never killed anybody, it is true, but it is because I lacked the courage or the time, not because I lacked the desire

Men gladly believe what they wish. -Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt

Or perhaps it is just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our strength --or else we die.

As soon as one promises not to do something, it becomes the one thing above all others that one most wishes to do.

Humans can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet they're potentially more vicious than any other. They are the only ones who can be persuaded to hate millions of their own kind whom they have never seen and to kill as many as they can lay their hands on in the name of their tribe or their God.

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others.

There is implanted in every man, naturally, a strong desire for progress.