Clarence Darrow Quotes

During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.....There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed.

The intolerance of the Middle, and even later, Ages, is a fact all too familiar to every one.

Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.

Every attempt to stop science has been characterized by darkness.

[Spanish] unreasoning religious ardor culminated in the Inquisition, established for the purpose of securing the supreme good of unblemished purity and uniformity of belief. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of this, and no sacrifice was deemed too great for its accomplishment. All officials, from the king downward, were sworn to its support, and the sinister influence which it exercised was proportioned to the enormous power which it wielded.

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.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, as many as 60,000 people were executed in Europe as suspected witches. But it would be nice to think that centuries of advances in science and education have made people less prey to phantasms and falsehoods.

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.

Sectarianism, bigotry, and it's horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful Earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

The tale is one of an evil time, When souls were fettered and thought was crime, And heresy's whisper above its breath Meant shameful scourging and bonds and death!

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilization. It has kept mankind in chains.

It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and overzealous piety.

Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding.

The slayers of the heretics are the worst heretics of all.

If my son were to oppose the Catholic Church, I myself would carry the faggots to burn him.

The main threat to freedom comes from church ministers who depend upon fear and superstitions to gain and to keep power

The church knows that an educated man is an unbeliever. That is why there is a continual struggle on the part of the clergy to adulterate education with superstition. To maintain their untenable position they must keep the people shackled to a form of mental slavery.

May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.

We shall take the Scopes case to the United States Supreme Court if necessary to establish that a teacher may tell the truth without being thrown in jail.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.