"If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in
the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the
private schools and 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... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding.
Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers;
tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, 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 faggots to burn the men who dared to
bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind."
-- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938), at the Scopes Monkey Trial
"The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be
precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior
of Afghanistan."
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
