“I love being around people who work with their hands, who do the hard things to keep our country going. They’re just my kind of people.”

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it’s at the bottom. It’s the people who are in school systems that don’t educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.

My grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal.

It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I’m supposed to think.

I actually think that I have been fortunate to have had misfortune, because the response, in responding to the misfortune, you develop in your own life, you develop sort of the tools you need to continue on, or to do better.

And I don’t think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there’s another set of moral codes, but I don’t think government has a role.

Any discrimination, like sharp turns in a road, becomes critical because of the tremendous speed at which we are traveling into the high-tech world of a service economy.

Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.

If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything-and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.

The truth of the matter is we have become more interested in designer jeans and break dancing than we are in obligations and responsibilities.

The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.

Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah.

I grew up in a religious environment, and I’m proud of it.

I was smart enough to use pot without getting caught, and now I’m on the Supreme Court. If you were stupid enough to get caught, that’s your problem. Your appeal is denied. This 40 year sentence just might teach you a lesson.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.

I do think that our freedoms are at risk.

I agree with the (Supreme Court’s) holding that racial discrimination in higher education admissions will be illegal in 25 years. They are illegal now.

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation—until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.

In this country your guilty until proven wealthy.

Her body is a undiscovered country and she is afraid that someone will colonize it and expect her to thank them for the wreckage.

I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade with each becomes more valuable to the other.

America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.

I do not prize the word cheap. It is not a word of inspiration. It is the badge of poverty, the signal of distress. Cheap merchandise means cheap men and cheap men mean a cheap country.

What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us.

The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country.