Life & Mortality Quote by Clarence Darrow

Darrow’s line lands like a courtroom wink: a profession built on rules and restraint suddenly admits to a very human, very impolite satisfaction. The opening clause performs moral hygiene - “I never wanted to see anybody die” - establishing the speaker as civilized, even compassionate. Then the pivot: “but,” the trapdoor word. He doesn’t endorse violence; he just confesses to enjoying the paperwork after the fact. It’s vengeance laundered through decorum.

That’s the intent: to name a feeling most people have had and most people won’t claim, especially in public. Darrow frames it as a matter of reading, not doing. The pleasure is displaced onto “obituary notices,” the most socially acceptable venue for private judgment. In a single sentence he exposes how respectability works: we condemn cruelty, yet we maintain a quiet mental list of those whose exit feels like relief.

Subtextually, it’s also a jab at sanctimony. Obituaries are supposed to be instruments of public mercy, smoothing a life into a few flattering paragraphs. Darrow implies that some lives resist that polishing, and that the community’s true verdict leaks out in the reader’s reaction. Coming from a lawyer famous for defending the despised and puncturing moral panics, the line reads less like spite than like realism about human hypocrisy. He’s not asking you to be cruel; he’s daring you to admit you’re not as pure as you perform.