People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.
ANTONIN SCALIA[The Freedom of Information Act is] the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored.
More Antonin Scalia Quotes
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One can be sophisticated and believe in God. Reason and intellect are not to be laid aside where matters of religion are concerned.
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Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.
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You could have 50 different states having 50 different regulations until they were all litigated out.
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The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.
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[If critics of the Pledge of Allegiance persuaded the public it should be changed] then we could eliminate under God from the Pledge of Allegiance, that could be democratically done.
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Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.
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[International law] doesn’t show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn’t show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what’s fundamentally important to somebody else today.
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As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to ‘do what the people want,’ instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.
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The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly.
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Certainly one cannot ban cross burning in the sanctity of his bedroom.
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The court’s job is to uphold the Constitution and you don’t call that off in times of crisis. Would the framers have allowed this practice?
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To many Americans, everything from the Easter morning to the Ascension had to be made up by the groveling enthusiasts as part of their plan to get themselves martyred.
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A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.
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What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?
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A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.
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