I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.
CLARENCE THOMASMy 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.
More Clarence Thomas Quotes
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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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I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system.
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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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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 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 really have the luxury to be bitter. I don’t have the luxury of having negative things in my life.
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When I was a kid, we said that we were precluded from going to certain neighborhoods because of the color of our skin Now the neighborhoods are the neighborhoods of ideas, youre not supposed to be there because of the color of your skin.
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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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And 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.
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I have to admit that I’m one of those people that thinks the dishwasher is a miracle.
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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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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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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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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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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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