Top 100 Antonin Quotes
#1. On a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years. We've just lost a great writer in Antonin Scalia.
Dahlia Lithwick
#2. Classroom Activities
1. Using felt and yarn, make a hand puppet of Clarence Thomas. Ta-da! You're Antonin Scalia!
Jon Stewart
#3. Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.
Andrew Solomon
#4. It has been hard to get my head around how Justice Antonin Scalia rationalizes his decisions. His body blow to the Voting Rights Act was a head scratcher, but at least he was calm when he attempted to justify his odd logic.
Henry Rollins
#5. I wouldn't want [gay marriage] to go to the United States Supreme Court now because that homophobe Antonin Scalia has too many votes on this current court.
Barney Frank
#6. I'm arguing for progressive positions on behalf of a progressive administration in front of a court who, before Justice [Antonin] Scalia's death, had a conservative majority that was quite conservative, frankly.
Donald Verrilli Jr.
#7. All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.
Antonin Artaud
#8. If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?
Antonin Scalia
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Stalin said artists are the engineers of human souls. I wanted to show what happens to the soul when the engineers get through with it.
Antonin Kratochvil
#13. 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
#14. A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.
Antonin Scalia
#15. I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
Antonin Artaud
#16. 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
#17. I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
Antonin Artaud
#19. 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
#20. I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this
I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
Antonin Artaud
#21. Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
Antonin Artaud
#22. 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
#23. And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.
Antonin Artaud
#24. 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
#25. I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself
Antonin Artaud
#26. I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.
Antonin Artaud
#28. A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.
Antonin Scalia
#29. I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
Antonin Artaud
#30. Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols ... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.
Antonin Artaud
#31. A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
Antonin Artaud
#32. When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted?
Antonin Scalia
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
Antonin Artaud
#36. The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
Antonin Artaud
#37. People look at rights as if they were muscles - the more you exercise them, the better they get.
Antonin Scalia
#38. The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.
Antonin Artaud
#39. A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.
Antonin Scalia
#40. 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
#43. Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgements, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm.
Antonin Sertillanges
#44. 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
#45. [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
#46. If it is a book, do not leave it without being able to sum it up and to estimate its value.
Antonin Sertillanges
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#51. 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
#52. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression - at least, not in the beginning - and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.
Antonin Dvorak
#53. Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?
Antonin Scalia
#54. I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
Antonin Artaud
#55. 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
#56. It's not up to the courts to invent new minorities that get special protections.
Antonin Scalia
#57. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness.
Antonin Artaud
#58. Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry
out a death sentence properly reached.
Antonin Scalia
#59. I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
Antonin Artaud
#60. 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
#61. Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
Antonin Artaud
#62. In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.
Antonin Dvorak
#63. Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State".
Antonin Scalia
#64. By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will ... now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.
Antonin Artaud
#65. 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
#67. God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools ... and He has not been disappointed.
Antonin Scalia
#68. There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
Antonin Artaud
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. By this act He affirms that the enemy of love is pride, and that the enemy of all good is the refusal to love.
Antonin Sertillanges
#73. [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
#74. For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the search for eternal happiness at any price, and mademoiselle Lucifer is that slut who never wanted to abandon eternal happiness.
Antonin Artaud
#75. I think Thomas Jefferson would have said the more speech, the better.
Antonin Scalia
#76. Tyrannies have long lists of rights. What they do not have is structural restraints on the power of government.
Antonin Scalia
#77. I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
Antonin Artaud
#78. I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
Antonin Artaud
#79. 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
#80. No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud
#81. It is the very reason-for-being of language and grammar that I
unhinge.
Antonin Artaud
#82. 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
#84. It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.
Antonin Artaud
#85. 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
#86. The fixation of the theater in one language
written words, music, lights, noises
betokens its imminent ruin.
Antonin Artaud
#87. Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Antonin Artaud
#88. 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
#89. Look in the heart and write ... The man who writes like that, without pride or artifice, as it were for himself, is in reality speaking for humanity. Humanity will recognize itself in him, because it is human nature that has inspired the discourse. Life recognizes life!
Antonin Sertillanges
#90. Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination,
Antonin Artaud
#91. We must beware of yielding to the pressure of a spirit of cowardly conformity which proclaims itself everybody's friend in the hope that everybody will obligingly return the compliment.
Antonin Sertillanges
#92. All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.
Antonin Artaud
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. In the eyes of government we are just one race here. It is American.
Antonin Scalia
#96. There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel
Antonin Artaud
#97. With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
Antonin Artaud
#98. Campaign promises are - by long democratic tradition - the least binding form of human commitment.
Antonin Scalia
#99. The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes; that is the
secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the
reality of this fascination for one moment.
Antonin Artaud
#100. Before saying anything further about culture, I consider the world is
hungry and does not care about culture, and people artificially want
to turn these thoughts away from hunger and direct them towards
culture.
Antonin Artaud
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