Best 80 quotes of Antonin Scalia on MyQuotes

Antonin Scalia

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to 'do what the people want,' instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society. We are fools for Christ's sake. We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Ever so subtly, without even alluding to the last obstacles preserved by earlier opinions that we now push out of our path, we effectively replace the goal of a discrimination-free society with the quite imcompatible goal of proportionate representation by race and by sex in the workplace.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    For in order for capitalism to work -- in order for it to produce a good and a stable society -- the traditional Christian virtues are essential.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools...and He has not been disappointed....If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Having had the good fortune to serve beside her on both courts, I can attest that her opinions are always thoroughly considered, always carefully crafted and almost always correct (which is to say we sometimes disagree). That much is apparent for all to see. What only her colleagues know is that her suggestions improve the opinions the rest of us write, and that she is a source of collegiality and good judgment in all our work.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    I am glad that I am not raising kids today. And I’m rather pessimistic that my grandchildren will enjoy the great society that I’ve enjoyed in my lifetime. I really think it’s coarsened. It’s coarsened in so many ways. One of the things that upsets me about modern society is the coarseness of manners. You can’t go to a movie — or watch a television show for that matter — without hearing the constant use of the F-word — including, you know, ladies using it. People that I know don’t talk like that!

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    [If critics of the Pledge of Allegiance persuaded the public it should be changed] then we could eliminate under God from the Pledge of Allegiance, that could be democratically done.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag. But I am not king.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    If you're going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you're probably doing something wrong.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    In a big family the first child is kind of like the first pancake. If it's not perfect, that's okay, there are a lot more coming along.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution's focus upon the individual. ...To pursue the concept of racial entitlement - even for the most admirable and benign of purposes - is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    [International law] doesn't show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn't show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what's fundamentally important to somebody else today.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    In the eyes of government we are just one race here. It is American.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    It is a Constitution that morphs while you look at it like Plasticman.... That is contrary to our whole tradition, to in God we trust on the coins, to Thanksgiving proclamations, to (Congressional) chaplains, to tax exemption for places of worship, which has always existed in America.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    It's a long, uphill fight to get back to original orthodoxy. We have two 'originalists' on the Supreme Court. That's something.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    It would also be strange to find in the midst of a catalog of the rights of individuals a provision securing to the states the right to maintain a designated "Militia." Dispassionate scholarship suggests quite strongly that the right of the people to keep and bear arms meant just that.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    It would be gross understatement to say that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not a model of clarity. It is in many important respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self-contradiction.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Justice White's conclusion is perhaps correct, if one assumes that the task of a court of law is to plumb the intent of the particular Congress that enacted a particular provision. That methodology is not mine nor, I think, the one that courts have traditionally followed. It is our task, as I see it, not to enter the minds of the Members of Congress - who need have nothing in mind in order for their votes to be both lawful and effective - but rather to give fair and reasonable meaning to the text of the United States Code, adopted by various Congresses at various times.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis--that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    More importantly, the Court forgets that ours is a government of laws and not of men. That means we are governed by the terms of our laws, not by the unenacted will of our lawmakers. 'If Congress enacted into law something different from what it intended, then it should amend the statute to conform to its intent.' In the meantime, this Court 'has no roving license ... to disregard clear language simply on the view that ... Congress 'must have intended' something broader.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Nowhere else in the Constitution does a "right" attributed to "the people" refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention "the people," the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset... The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms... The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it "shall not be infringed.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    One can be sophisticated and believe in God. Reason and intellect are not to be laid aside where matters of religion are concerned.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    On this day, when we're celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage - to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it's a good idea.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that 'established by the State' means 'established by the State or the Federal Government,' the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as "inartful drafting.' This Court, however, has no free-floating power 'to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.'

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea and pass a law. That's what democracy is all about. It's not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything-it can stop the Vietnam War. It can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act's limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    Scalia said the court had pretty much signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, adding: Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break. But you would have to be an idiot to believe that. The Constitution is not a living organism; it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    The attitude of people associating guns with nothing but crime, that is what has to be changed. I grew up at a time when people were not afraid of people with firearms.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    The Constitution does not trust judges to make determinations of criminal guilt.

  • By Anonym
    Antonin Scalia

    The Court's decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people's decision to give Congress '[a]ll legislative Powers' enumerated in the Constitution. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them.