Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Antonin Scalia
99 quotes
“This case, involving legal requirements for the content and labeling of meat products such as frankfurters, affords a rare opportunity to explore simultaneously both parts of Bismarck's aphorism that 'No man should see how laws or sausages are made.'”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Community Nutrition Institute v. Block, 749 F.2d 50, 51 (D.C. Cir. 1984); decided December 5, 1984.
“In law school, I never understood [antitrust law]. I later found out, in reading the writings of those who now do understand it, that I should not have understood it because it did not make any sense then.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Antitrust law: Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, 8/5/1986, transcript at p. 36).
“Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 699 (1988) (dissenting).
“Evidently, the governing standard is to be what might be called the unfettered wisdom of a majority of this Court, revealed to an obedient people on a case-by-case basis.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On legislating from the bench: Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654 (1988) (dissenting).
“How frightening it must be to have your own independent counsel and staff appointed, with nothing else to do but to investigate you until investigation is no longer worthwhile.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the independent counsel law: Morrison v. Olson (1988) (dissenting).
“Those who believe that racial preferences can help to 'even the score' display, and reinforce, a manner of thinking about race that was the source of the injustice and that will, if it endures within our society, be the source of more injustice still.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On affirmative action: Richmond v. Croson Co. (1989) (concurring).
“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.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pennsylvania v. Union Gas Co., 491 U.S. 1 (1989) (concurring in part and dissenting in part).
“I am persuaded, therefore, that the Maryland procedure is virtually constitutional. Since it is not, however, actually constitutional, I would affirm the judgment of the Maryland Court of Appeals reversing the judgment of conviction.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836 (1990).
“Today's extension of the Edwards prohibition is the latest stage of prophylaxis built upon prophylaxis, producing a veritable fairyland castle of imagined constitutional restriction upon law enforcement.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Minnick v. Mississippi, 498 US 146 (1990) (dissenting).
“Perhaps the dissenters believe that 'offense to others' ought to be the only reason for restricting nudity in public places generally. . . . The purpose of Indiana's nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On decency laws: Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. (1991) (concurring).
“Life is too short to pursue every human act to its most remote consequences; "for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost" is a commentary on fate, not the statement of a major cause of action against a blacksmith.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Holmes v.SIPC, 503 U.S. 258 (1991) (concurring).
“I think [that] '[t]he judicial Power of the United States' conferred upon this Court 'and such inferior courts as Congress may establish', must be deemed to be the judicial power as understood by our common-law tradition. That is the power 'to say what the law is', Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803), not the power to change it.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: James M. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia, 501 U.S. 529 (1991) (concurring).
“The Court's statement that it is 'tempting' to acknowledge the authoritativeness of tradition in order to 'curb the discretion of federal judges' is, of course, rhetoric rather than reality; no government official is 'tempted' to place restraints upon his own freedom of action, which is why Lord Acton did not say 'Power tends to purify.' The Court's temptation is in the quite opposite and more natural direction -- towards systematically eliminating checks upon its own power; and it succumbs.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) (dissenting).
“In Barnette, we held that a public school student could not be compelled to recite the Pledge; we did not even hint that she could not be compelled to observe respectful silence. . . . Logically, that ought to be the next target for the Court's bulldozer.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Pledge of Allegiance: Lee v. Weisman (1992) (dissenting).
“I find it a sufficient embarrassment that our Establishment Clause jurisprudence regarding holiday displays has come to 'require[e] scrutiny more commonly associated with interior decorators than with the judiciary'. But interior decorating is a rock hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lee v. Weisman (1992, dissenting); decided June 24, 1992.
“The Court's reliance upon stare decisis can best be described as contrived. It insists upon the necessity of adhering not to all of Roe, but only to what it calls the 'central holding.' It seems to me that stare decisis ought to be applied even to the doctrine of stare decisis, and I confess never to have heard of this new, keep-what-you-want-and-throw-away-the-rest version.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On stare decisis (adhering to judicial precedent): Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) (dissenting).
“I frankly doubt, moreover, whether the fiercely proud men who adopted our Fourth Amendment would have allowed themselves to be subjected, on mere suspicion of being armed and dangerous, to such indignity.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Minnesota v. Dickerson, 508 U.S. 366 (1993) (concurring).
“'Abusive' (or 'hostile,' which in this context I take to mean the same thing) does not seem to me a very clear standard - and I do not think clarity is at all increased by adding the adverb objectively or by appealing to a reasonable person's notion of what the vague word means.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., 510 U.S. 17 (1993) (concurring).
“I have been willing, in the case of civil statutes, to acknowledge a doctrine of scrivener's error that permits a court to give an unusual (though not unheard of) meaning to a word which, if given its normal meaning, would produce an absurd and arguably unconstitutional result.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: U.S. v. X-Citement Video Inc., 513 U.S. 64 (1994).
“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.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200, 239 (1995) (Scalia, J., concurring).
“Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Princeton University (1995), as quoted in a Scalia profile published by The Christian Science Monitor.
“It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members' personal view of what would make a 'more perfect Union' (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a 'more perfect world') can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On judicial arrogance: United States v. Virginia (1996) (dissenting).
“It is hard to consider women a 'discrete and insular minority', unable to employ the 'political processes ordinarily to be relied upon' when they constitute a majority of the electorate. And the suggestion that they are incapable of exerting that political power smacks of the same paternalism that the Court so roundly condemns.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On legal paternalism: United States v. Virginia (1996) (dissenting).
“The tradition of having government-funded military schools for men is as well rooted in the traditions of this country as the tradition of sending only men into military combat. The people may decide to change the one tradition, like the other, through democratic processes; but the assertion that either tradition has been unconstitutional through the centuries is not law, but politics-smuggled-into-law.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On gender equality: United States v. Virginia (1996) (dissenting).
“What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court, that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional? […] The Court must be living in another world. Day by day, case by case, it is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1654 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Board of County Commissioners, Wabaunsee County, Kansas, v. Umbehr, 518 U.S. 668, No. 94-1654 (1996, dissenting); decided June 28, 1996.
“I respectfully, and indeed diffidently, dissent.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Saratoga Fishing Co. v. J. M. Martinac & Co., 520 U.S. 875 (1997) (dissenting).
“Bork has essentially given up. I'm not ready to throw in the towel.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Asked about philosophical ally Robert Bork's urging that Congress override some Supreme Court rulings: Speech to the Anti-Defamation League (May 1997).
“I'm not going to rip all that up. It's water over the dam. The people have gotten used to it. You know, that's what Stare Decisis is all about. In other words, I am an originalist. I am a textualist. I am not a nut.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On originalism vs. : Manhattan Institute Lecture (17 November 1997).
“Textualism should not be confused with so-called strict constructionism, which is a degraded form of textualism that brings the whole philosophy into disrepute. I am not a strict constructionist, and no one ought to be--though better that, I suppose, than a nontextualist. A text should not be construed strictly, and it should not be construed leniently; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation 23 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). (PDF).
“If to state this case is not to decide it, the law has departed further from the meaning of language than is appropriate for a government that is supposed to rule (and to be restrained) through the written word.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: United States v. Rodriguez-Moreno, 526 U.S. 275 (1998) (Scalia, dissenting).
“Avant-garde artistes such as respondents remain entirely free to épater les bourgeois [shock the middle classes]; they are merely deprived of the additional satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it. It is preposterous to equate the denial of taxpayer subsidy with measures 'aimed at the suppression of dangerous ideas.'”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On tax-funded art: National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998) (concurring).
“'The operation was a success, but the patient died.' What such a procedure is to medicine, the Court's opinion in this case is to law.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, 524 U.S. 569 (1998) (Scalia, concurring).
“Legislative flexibility on the part of Congress will be the touchstone of federalism when the capacity to support combustion becomes the acid test of a fire extinguisher. Congressional flexibility is desirable, of course - but only within the bounds of federal power established by the Constitution. Beyond those bounds (the theory of our Constitution goes), it is a menace.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Ed. Expense Bd., 527 U.S. 666 (1999).
“In my view, a right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the 'unalienable Rights' with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims 'all Men . . . are endowed by their Creator.'”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On parental rights: Troxel v. Granville (2000) (dissenting).
“What today's decision will stand for, whether the Justices can bring themselves to say it or not, is the power of the Supreme Court to write a prophylactic, extraconstitutional Constitution, binding on Congress and the States.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428, 461 (2000) (dissenting).
“The notion that the Constitution of the United States, designed, among other things, 'to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,' prohibits the States from simply banning this visibly brutal means of eliminating our half-born posterity is quite simply absurd.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) (dissenting).
“I am left to defend the 'dead' Constitution.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On a living Constitution: Speech at Marquette University in Milwaukee (13 March 2001).
“My difficulty with Roe v. Wade is a legal rather than a moral one. I do not believe – and no one believed for 200 years – that the Constitution contains a right to abortion. And if a state were to permit abortion on demand, I would and could in good conscience vote against an attempt to invalidate that law, for the same reason that I vote against invalidation of laws that contradict Roe v. Wade; namely, simply because the Constitution gives the federal government and, hence, me no power over the matter.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Call for Reckoning: Religion and the Death Penalty - Pew Forum conference at the University of Chicago (25 January 2002). N.b. this speech was later modified into an article - God's Justice and Ours which repeats much t…
“Today's decision is the pinnacle of our Eighth Amendment death-is-different jurisprudence. Not only does it, like all of that jurisprudence, find no support in the text or history of the Eighth Amendment; it does not even have support in current social attitudes regarding the conditions that render an otherwise just death penalty inappropriate. Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Atkins v. Virginia (2002) (dissenting).
“Campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On campaign promises: Republican Party v. White, 536 U.S. 765 (2002) (majority opinion).
“Since [Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S.], I have acquired new wisdom ...or, to put it more critically, have discarded old ignorance”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Admitting fallibility: Concurring in Ring v. Arizona 536 U.S. 584 (2002).
“[Laws] prohibiting sodomy do not seem to have been enforced against consenting adults acting in private... I do not know what 'acting in private' means; surely consensual sodomy, like heterosexual intercourse, is rarely performed on stage.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the right to sodomy: Lawrence v. Texas (2003) (dissenting).
“[The Texas anti-sodomy statute] undoubtedly imposes constraints on liberty. So do laws prohibiting prostitution, recreational use of heroin, and, for that matter, working more than 60 hours per week in a bakery. But there is no right to 'liberty' under the Due Process Clause, though today's opinion repeatedly makes that claim. . . . The Fourteenth Amendment expressly allows States to deprive their citizens of 'liberty,' so long as 'due process of law' is provided. . . .”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the right to sodomy: Lawrence v. Texas (2003) (dissenting).
“If you care passionately about something has become the only test to determine if something is constitutional. How passionately do you care?”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the University of Chicago Law School (6 May 2003).
“People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the University of Chicago Law School (6 May 2003).
“You could fire a grapefruit out of a cannon over the best law schools in the country - and that includes Chicago - and not hit an originalist.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On modern teaching of law: Speech at University of Chicago Law School, (6 May 2003).
“We Americans have a method for making the laws that are over us. We elect representatives to two Houses of Congress, each of which must enact the new law and present it for the approval of a President, whom we also elect. For over two decades now, unelected federal judges have been usurping this lawmaking power by converting what they regard as norms of international law into American law. Today's opinion approves that process in principle, though urging the lower courts to be more restrained. This Court seems incapable of admitting that some matters - any matters - are none of its business.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain et al., 542 U. S. 692 (2004) (concurring in part and concurring in judgment).
“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.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On civil rights and the Global War on Terrorism: Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) (dissenting).
“Robert F. Kennedy used to say, 'Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not?'; that outlook has become a far too common and destructive approach to interpreting the law”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Catholic University, Columbus School of Law (2004).
“Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Confrontation Clause: Writing for the majority in Crawford v. Washington 541 U.S. 36 (2004).