Clarence Darrow Quotes

If conduct is intentional, it could subject some of the criminal liability.

The laws do not take upon them to punish any other than overt acts.

I might talk about killing people, but that doesn't mean I do it.

the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

it is not the deed but the intention that makes the crime.

The true criminal must be defined as a man who commits a crime though he is as decently fed and clothed as others.

For whoever meditates a crime is guilty of the deed.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

They committed murder, it is true; but their situation may have rendered it inevitable.

Crimes spring from fixed ideas.

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

All my books deal with the effect of intent upon action, how our understanding of good and evil depends heavily on context.

Ideas won't go to jail.

Finally, with regard to actions manifestly bad or criminal, to which a person is forced through fear of some great evil, and especially death; we must lay down as a general rule, that the unhappy circumstances, under which a person labors, may indeed diminish the crime of a man unequal to this trial, who commits a bad action in spite of himself, and against his own inward conviction, yet the action remains intrinsically vicious, and worthy of censure; wherefore it may be, and actually is imputed, unless the exception of necessity can be alleged in the person's favor.

He is not guilty who is not guilty of his own free will.

The perpetration of a crime is accompanied by illness!

Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.

When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross.

You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn't shot anybody. Yet.

Men not living to what they know, cannot blame God, that they know no more.

If rape or arson, poison or the knife Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff Of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough!

No action will be considered blameless, unless the will was so, for by the will the act was dictated.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.