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.
CLARENCE THOMASMy grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal.
More Clarence Thomas Quotes
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I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.
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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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And I thank God I believe in God, or I would probably be enormously angry right now.
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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.
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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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Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.
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The only people who have quick answers don’t have the responsibility of making the decisions.
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Today, now, it is time to move forward, a time to look for what is good in others, what is good in our country. It is time to see what we have in common, what we have to share as human beings and citizens.
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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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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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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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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.
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Even as someone who’s labeled a conservative – I’m a Republican I’m black, I’m heading up this organization in the Reagan administration – I can say that conservatives don’t exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they’re welcome.
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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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The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.
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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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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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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.
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I do think that our freedoms are at risk.
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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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You didn’t think of angels as white or black. They were angels.
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Unfortunately, the reality was that, for political reasons or whatever, there was a need to enforce antidiscrimination laws, or at least there was a perceived need to do that.
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So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest
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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.
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I grew up in a religious environment, and I’m proud of it.
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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.
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