The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
is. I know that no man who ever wrote a line that
I read failed to influence me to some extent. I
know that every life I ever touched influenced me,
and I influenced it; and that it is not given to me
to unravel the infinite causes and say, " This is I,
and this is you; I am responsible for so much, and
you are r£sponsible for so much." I know that in
the universe everything has its place and that the
smallest particle is a part of all. Tell me that you
can visit the wrath of fate and chance and life and
eternity upon a nineteen-year-old boy! If you
could, justice would be a travesty and mercy a
fraud.
I might say further about Nathan Leopold —
where did he get this philosophy? At college? He
did not make it, your Honor. He did not write
these books, and I will venture to say there are at
least ten thousand books on Nietzsche and his
philosophy. There is no university in the world
where the professors are not familiar with Nie-
tzsche; not one. There is not an intellectual man in
the world whose life and feelings run to philosophy,
who is not more or less familiar with the Nie-
tzschean philosophy. Some believe it, and some do
not believe it. Some read it as I do, and take it as
a theory, a dream, a vision, mixed with good and
bad, but not in any way related to human life.
Some take it seriously. The universities perhaps
do not all teach it, for perhaps some teach nothing
in philosophy; but they give the boys the books of
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