Parenting & Family Quote by Clarence Darrow

Darrow’s line lands like a punch because it flips the usual moral panic. We’re told doubt is corrosive, the gateway drug to nihilism. Darrow calls its absence the real catastrophe. “Tragedy” is doing a lot of work here: not a small pedagogical mistake, but a slow-motion civic and psychological disaster. He’s not romanticizing contrarianism for its own sake; he’s warning that certainty, when taught as virtue, becomes a tool of control.

As a lawyer who spent his career watching institutions manufacture “truth” in courtrooms, pulpits, and newspapers, Darrow understood how easily authority launders opinion into fact. The subtext is courtroom sharp: a child trained not to doubt is a future juror who won’t interrogate evidence, a voter who confuses slogans for arguments, a worker who accepts exploitation as “the way things are.” Doubt, for Darrow, isn’t adolescent rebellion; it’s a civic muscle.

The context matters. Darrow lived through the high tide of American fundamentalism and the public battles over science and schooling that culminated in the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” His outrage isn’t abstract. He’s looking at education systems that treat obedience as learning and calls that what it is: a betrayal of the mind’s job.

The genius of the phrasing is its simplicity. “Just think” sounds gentle, even parental, then he twists the knife. He’s asking you to mourn something we usually celebrate: the quiet, well-behaved child who never asks why.