Best Antonin Scalia Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#5. 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

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

Antonin Scalia

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. [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

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

#17. 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

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

Antonin Scalia

#19. Classroom Activities
1. Using felt and yarn, make a hand puppet of Clarence Thomas. Ta-da! You're Antonin Scalia!

Jon Stewart

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

Antonin Scalia

#21. 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

#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. 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

#24. 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

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

Antonin Scalia

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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