Quote
108
Notes
"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
Before anyone takes offense to the use of word fagot, please note that a fagot is a bundle of twigs and sticks often used as fuel to set things on fire; namely people in the 16th century.
With that cleared up, how sad it is that 87 years of scientific advancement have occurred since Darrow spoke those words and we’re still dealing with school boards trying to add Biblical creationism and exclude evolution from curricula. How incredibly depressing.
(via therikeone)
(via socialuprooting)