Freethought of the Day
April 24,
2012
“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, "Scopes Trial" courtroom speech, July 13, 1925
Compiled
by Annie Laurie Gaylor
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