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.
CLARENCE THOMASAnd I don’t think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there’s another set of moral codes, but I don’t think government has a role.
More Clarence Thomas Quotes
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I grew up in a religious environment, and I’m proud of it.
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Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
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I actually think that I have been fortunate to have had misfortune, because the response, in responding to the misfortune, you develop in your own life, you develop sort of the tools you need to continue on, or to do better.
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It takes a person with a mission to succeed.
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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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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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The thing that bothered me when I was in college was that I saw myself rejecting the way of life that got me to where I was.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.
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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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