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.
CLARENCE THOMASPeople 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.
More Clarence Thomas Quotes
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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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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 only people who have quick answers don’t have the responsibility of making the decisions.
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So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest
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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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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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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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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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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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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 was never a liberal. I was radical. I was cynical. I was negative. But, I was never a liberal. I always saw that as too lukewarm for me.
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I do think that our freedoms are at risk.
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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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Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
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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.
CLARENCE THOMAS







