“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.”

Perhaps some are confused because they have stereotypes of how blacks should be and I respectfully decline, as I did in my youth, to sacrifice who I am for who they think I should be.

You have a number of choices. You could continue to always fight against people who are really distractions. They’re people in the cheap seats of life. Or you can do what you went there to do.

You didn’t think of angels as white or black. They were angels.

The thing that bothered me when I was in college was that I saw myself rejecting the way of life that got me to where I was.

I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system.

I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes.

In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well, today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter.

Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.

The courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior. The mere fact that a school is black does not mean that it is the product of an unconstitutional violation.

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.

One of the first lessons a president has to learn is that every word he says weighs a ton.

The greatest lesson I learned that year in Mrs. Henry’s class was the lesson Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to teach us all: Never judge people by the color of their skin. God makes each of us unique in ways that go much deeper.

Every day is a lesson in focus for me, and not buying into the world’s concept of what you have to be. I really try every day to be individual and not just in my style or my look or my music, but in my approach to life.

One of the most fascinating lessons I’ve absorbed about life is that the struggle is good.

The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.

The lesson being that in life you control what you can.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

I am a saviour, I let you see what is to be shown, I don’t let people walk all over me now.