Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.
CLARENCE THOMASWe’ve talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
More Clarence Thomas Quotes
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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.
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I was smart enough to use pot without getting caught, and now I’m on the Supreme Court. If you were stupid enough to get caught, that’s your problem. Your appeal is denied. This 40 year sentence just might teach you a lesson.
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My 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.
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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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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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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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Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
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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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Perhaps some are confused because they have stereotypes of how blacks should be and I respectfully decline, as I did in my youth, to sacrifice who I am for who they think I should be.
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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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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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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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I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes.
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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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The truth of the matter is we have become more interested in designer jeans and break dancing than we are in obligations and responsibilities.
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