Antonin Scalia Quotes

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

Antonin Scalia

#2. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#3. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#4. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#5. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#6. A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.

Antonin Scalia

#7. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#8. The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly.

Antonin Scalia

#9. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#10. The court's job is to uphold the Constitution and you don't call that off in times of crisis. Would the framers have allowed this practice?

Antonin Scalia

#11. A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.

Antonin Scalia

#12. When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted?

Antonin Scalia

#13. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#14. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#15. People look at rights as if they were muscles - the more you exercise them, the better they get.

Antonin Scalia

#16. A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.

Antonin Scalia

#17. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#18. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#19. [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.

Antonin Scalia

#20. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#21. In 1905, the Supreme Court of the United States applied the rule to the country's founding document: The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted it means now.

Antonin Scalia

#22. The government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.

Antonin Scalia

#23. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#24. Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?

Antonin Scalia

#25. And what I would say now is, yes, if a state enacted a law permitting flogging, it is immensely stupid, but it is not unconstitutional. A lot of stuff that's stupid is not unconstitutional.

Antonin Scalia

#26. It's not up to the courts to invent new minorities that get special protections.

Antonin Scalia

#27. Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry
out a death sentence properly reached.

Antonin Scalia

#28. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#29. Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State".

Antonin Scalia

#30. With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.

Antonin Scalia

#31. God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools ... and He has not been disappointed.

Antonin Scalia

#32. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#33. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#34. Originalism says that when you consult the text, you give it the meaning it had when it was adopted, not some later modern meaning.

Antonin Scalia

#35. [The Freedom of Information Act is] the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored.

Antonin Scalia

#36. I think Thomas Jefferson would have said the more speech, the better.

Antonin Scalia

#37. Tyrannies have long lists of rights. What they do not have is structural restraints on the power of government.

Antonin Scalia

#38. To many Americans, everything from the Easter morning to the Ascension had to be made up by the groveling enthusiasts as part of their plan to get themselves martyred.

Antonin Scalia

#39. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#40. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#41. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#42. The purpose of the Federalist Society was to bring together young people who had this skepticism about what they were being taught and to let them know that there were others who shared this skepticism.

Antonin Scalia

#43. Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#45. Campaign promises are - by long democratic tradition - the least binding form of human commitment.

Antonin Scalia

#46. The right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the unalienable rights with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims all men [and women] are endowed by their creator.

Antonin Scalia

#47. If you are sentenced to torture for a crime, yes, that is a cruel punishment. But the mere fact that somebody is tortured is - is unlawful under - under our statutes, but the Constitution happens not to address it, just as it does not address a lot of other horrible things.

Antonin Scalia

#48. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#49. The wise do not investigate such silliness.

Antonin Scalia

#50. Why can't the state accede to the public's wishes?

Antonin Scalia

#51. But I'm not pro death penalty. I - I'm just anti the notion that it is not a matter for democratic choice, that it has been taken away from the democratic choice of the people by a provision of the Constitution.

Antonin Scalia

#52. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#53. There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.

Antonin Scalia

#54. The death penalty? Give me a break. It's easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.

Antonin Scalia

#55. Certainly one cannot ban cross burning in the sanctity of his bedroom.

Antonin Scalia

#56. To be honest about it, that is the view of Christians taken by modern society. Surely those who adhere to all or most of these traditional Christian beliefs are to be regarded as simpleminded.

Antonin Scalia

#57. Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.

Antonin Scalia

#58. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#59. 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 under the Constitution?

Antonin Scalia

#60. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#61. I try to be an honest originalist! I will take the bitter with the sweet!

Antonin Scalia

#62. The court makes an amazing amount of decisions that ought to be made by the people.

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#64. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#65. Originalism is sort of subspecies of textualism. Textualism means you are governed by the text. That's the only thing that is relevant to your decision, not whether the outcome is desirable, not whether legislative history says this or that. But the text of the statute.

Antonin Scalia

#66. This is an execution, not surgery. Where does that come from, that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain?

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#68. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#69. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#70. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#71. This is so absurd that it has, to my knowledge, never been contemplated.

Antonin Scalia

#72. [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.

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#75. This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent.

Antonin Scalia

#76. 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.

Antonin Scalia

#77. What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean?

Antonin Scalia

#78. 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.

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#81. I would not like to be replaced by someone who immediately sets about undoing what I've tried to do for 25-26 years.

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#83. It is myopic to base sweeping change on the narrow experience of a few years.

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#86. Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#88. You could have 50 different states having 50 different regulations ... until they were all litigated out.

Antonin Scalia

#89. 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.

Antonin Scalia