Words matter. These are the best Antonin Scalia Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It is not rational, never mind ‘appropriate,’ to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits.
A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.
Indeed, follow your star if you want to head north and it’s the North Star. But if you want to head north and it’s Mars, you had better follow somebody else’s star.
It’s absolutely clear that whatever cruel and unusual punishments may – may mean with regard to future things, such as death by injection or the electric chair, it’s clear that – that the death penalty, in and of itself, is not considered cruel and unusual punishment.
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited… It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.
I’m not a scientist. That’s why I don’t want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth.
I’m nervous about our civic culture. I’m not sure the Internet is largely the cause of it. It’s certainly the cause of careless writing. People who get used to blurbing things on the Internet are never going to be good writers.
I am something of a contrarian, I suppose. I feel less comfortable when everybody agrees with me. I say, ‘I better reexamine my position!’ I probably believe that the worst opinions in my court have been unanimous. Because there’s nobody on the other side pointing out all the flaws.
The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.
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.
To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.
If you condemn someone who has committed a crime to be tortured, that would be unconstitutional.
With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them – with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the ‘reasoned judgment’ of a bare majority of this Court – we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.
The only way to eliminate any government choice on what art is worthwhile, what art isn’t worthwhile, is to get the government totally out of the business of funding.
I attack ideas. I don’t attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can’t separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don’t want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel.
Winning and losing, that’s never been my objective. It’s my hope that in the fullness of time, the majority of the court will come to see things as I do.
Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change.
As a young man, you’re dazzled by the power of the White House and all that. But power tends to corrupt.
If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?
A man who has made no enemies is probably not a very good man.
Why can’t the state accede to the public’s wishes?
I do accept that, with – with respect to those vague terms in the Constitution such as equal protection of the laws, due process of law, cruel and unusual punishments. I fully accept that those things have to apply to new phenomena that didn’t exist at the time.
Burning the flag is a form of expression. Speech doesn’t just mean written words or oral words. It could be semaphore. And burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea – I hate the government, the government is unjust, whatever.
It’s not up to the courts to invent new minorities that get special protections.
The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.
The court makes an amazing amount of decisions that ought to be made by the people.
Being a good person begins with being a wise person. Then, when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction.
What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?
If there’s anything you absolutely hate, why, it must be unconstitutional. Or, if there’s anything you absolutely have to have, it must be required by the Constitution. That’s where we are. That is utterly mindless.
A good, hard-hitting dissent keeps you honest.
There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.
Wringing your hands about states’ rights, forget it. They’re gone. Basically, the federal government can do whatever it wants. Who’s going to protect the states? My court? Ha – we’re feds!
We have laws against torture. The Constitution says nothing whatever about torture. It speaks of punishment; ‘cruel and unusual’ punishments are forbidden.
My view is regardless of whether you think prohibiting abortion is good or whether you think prohibiting abortion is bad, regardless of how you come out on that, my only point is the Constitution does not say anything about it. It leaves it up to democratic choice.
A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.
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.
I’m an originalist and a textualist, not a nut.
By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition.
I try to be an honest originalist! I will take the bitter with the sweet!
The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment – in deterrence, and perhaps most of all in the meting out of condign justice for horrible crimes – outweighs the risk of error.
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.
I would not like to be replaced by someone who immediately sets about undoing what I’ve tried to do for 25-26 years.
The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.
There exists in some parts of the world sanctimonious criticism of America’s death penalty, as somehow unworthy of a civilized society.
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.
