Keeping the Faith Quotes

“The fundamental bedrock of liberty is tolerance,” he said in July 1925. And as if he could darkly anticipate the implications of the Scopes trial not just for Bryan, or Tennessee, or 1925, but for the future of a nation that was said to cherish liberty, he explained, “Tolerance means a willingness to let other people do, think, act and live as we think is not right; the antithesis of this is intolerance and means we demand the right to make others live as we think is right, not as they think is right.” Otherwise, as he had declared, no one was safe.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“No fluttering wings of doubt that would have brushed by another man’s eyes and made him stammer and hesitate in his climaxes, disturbed Bryan,” White observed. And there was something stubborn about him. “Facts never budged him,” White later recalled. “Wild horses could never drag him from a stand.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“To Darrow, there could be no democracy without reason, which is to say, without education and an educated people. For he imagined, or at least he hoped, that people might lead better, fairer, more just lives if they knew more.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“consolation of a theocracy—a nation of Christians that legally enforced moral behavior and could thereby revive the values that he associated with a white, rural, decent and upstanding America.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Though he knew little about science and even less about evolution, Bryan intuited with stunning accuracy the frustration and anger and anxiety of the people he represented and claimed to speak for, particularly the religious Fundamentalists. Confident of his mission and sure of himself,”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure,” he said, generously smiling. “That is all ‘agnostic’ means.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry and hate,” Clarence Darrow said, “and these fires are being lighted today in America.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Mencken didn’t return the compliment. He had not forgotten the jailing of conscientious objectors or the arrest of German Americans before and during the war, or after it, the “Red Scare,” the deportations and harassments, all of which he associated with prohibitionists, fanatics, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Ku Kluxers—and William Jennings Bryan.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Liberty is always under threat,” Scopes concluded, “and it literally takes eternal vigilance to maintain it.” He quoted Clarence Darrow: “You can only be free if I am free.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Prejudice is not unique to Tennessee; it is ubiquitous and not easily eradicated,” he added. “On its simplest level, prejudice means people are afraid of what they don’t know and don’t understand. By this criteria, who of us is not affected by prejudice?”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“The country was coming to be governed not by law,” Hays presciently declared, “but by threat of ruination made by various irresponsible groups of imposing title and supposedly pious purpose.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“They had used the prerogatives of democracy to destroy the hopes of democracy.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“The size of the electorate, the impossibility of educating it sufficiently, the fierce ignorance of these millions of semi-literate, priest-ridden and parson-ridden people have gotten me to the point where I want to confine the actions of majorities.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“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 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 fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Bryan at his best was simply a magnificent job-seeker,” Mencken observed, “deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, and fine and noble things.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“in all human beings, if only understanding be brought to the business, dignity will be found, and that dignity cannot fail to reveal itself, soon or late, in the words and phrases with which they make known the high hopes and aspirations and cry out against the intolerable meaninglessness of life.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“I have been an agnostic to all creeds that have come before me, but am still seeking with an open mind, and I hope I may still find an answer. “We all live on hope,”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“A Tennessee state senator who voted for it said he felt pressured by the fanatics.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Free thought is the most important issue that has been raised,” the British biologist Julian Huxley remarked during the trial. “That is the real danger to a young democracy that has not got to the full pitch of its development—that it is likely to be swayed by crowd psychology and violence in expressing its opinions and forcing them on other people.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“He is not seeking the truth; he has it,”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“No advantage,” Bryan rationalized, “is to be gained by ignoring race prejudice.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Prejudice encountered prejudice; intolerance, intolerance. And though this compelled Darrow and Bryan, and those like them, to adopt extravagant positions, they were speaking of that longstanding debate between reason and faith, or what passed for reason and faith, which was a debate not easily resolved by extremes.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Neither the so-called modernists nor the Fundamentalists could see Darrow or Bryan whole.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“So something greater was at stake than whether a young schoolteacher had taught from an authorized textbook that mentioned evolution.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

“Darrow leaned over to Arthur Hays to ask, as if with a sigh, “Isn’t it difficult to realize that a trial of this kind is possible in the twentieth century in the United States of America?”
― Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation