Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.
Interpretation
Pursuing truth passionately can lead to personal liberation, even if you never fully grasp it.
In this quote, Clarence Darrow emphasizes the importance of passionately seeking the truth. The journey itself towards understanding and uncovering truth can lead to personal freedom and enlightenment, even if the complete truth remains elusive, suggesting that the act of searching is valuable in itself.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on the importance of seeking knowledge.
With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men.
Do I need to argue to Your Honor that cruelty only breeds cruelty? That hatred only causes hatred; that if there is any way to soften this human heart which is hard enough at its best, if there is any way to kill evil and hatred and all that goes with it, it is not through evil and hatred and cruelty; it is through charity, and love, and understanding?
Chase after the truth like all hell.
No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.
Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing from him who will not give her all. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers.
The trouble with law is lawyers.
I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
A man can counterfeit love, he can counterfeit faith, he can counterfeit hope and all the other graces, but it is very difficult to counterfeit humility.
The patient is not likely to recover who makes the doctor his heir.
You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.
Every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.
Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.
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