But what I believe is that if a person’s individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don’t issue mandates to businesses that you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that.
CLARENCE THOMASReligious 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.
More Clarence Thomas Quotes
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A theory deeply etched in our law is that a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand.
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The only people who have quick answers don’t have the responsibility of making the decisions.
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Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.
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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.
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So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest
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The Constitution does not vest in Congress the authority to protect society from every bad act that might befall it. If followed to its logical extreme, [this approach] would result in an unwarranted expansion of federal power.
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My grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal.
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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.
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It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I’m supposed to think.
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I don’t really have the luxury to be bitter. I don’t have the luxury of having negative things in my life.
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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.
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To define each of us by our race is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.
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I think segregation is bad, I think it’s wrong, it’s immoral. I’d fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don’t need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write.
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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.
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The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.
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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.
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We’ve talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
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It takes a person with a mission to succeed.
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My grandfather was a man, when he talked about freedom, his attitude was really interesting. His view was that you had obligations or you had responsibilities, and when you fulfilled those obligations or responsibilities, that then gave you the liberty to do other things.
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I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes.
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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.
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And I thank God I believe in God, or I would probably be enormously angry right now.
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I have to admit that I’m one of those people that thinks the dishwasher is a miracle.
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A judge should be evaluated by whether he faithfully upholds his oath to God, not to the people, to the state or to the Constitution.
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Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
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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.
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