My grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal.
CLARENCE THOMASI 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.
More Clarence Thomas Quotes
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I don’t know one of my friends who is considered a conservative who has not had to go back and thoroughly think through everything. You do a lot of soul-searching – ’cause we are not going to win any popularity contests.
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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.
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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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I do think that our freedoms are at risk.
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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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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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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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I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system.
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The job of a judge is to figure out what the law says, not what he wants it to say. There is a difference between the role of a judge and that of a policy maker… Judging requires a certain impartiality.
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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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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.
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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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Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.
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I grew up in a religious environment, and I’m proud of it.
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The truth of the matter is we have become more interested in designer jeans and break dancing than we are in obligations and responsibilities.
CLARENCE THOMAS