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Antonin Scalia Quotes

Total quotes: 12
“The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.”
— Antonin Scalia, Scalia Defends Government's Right to Deny Art Funds
Tagged: Lawyer, romance, Mystery, Irony, Ambiguity
“Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges it has confronted are any worse now, or, alas, even much different, from what they ever were.”
— Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's Commencement Address at Stone Ridge: MyMCM : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Tagged: humanity, Challenges, History, Plus Ca Change
“I am an originalist. I am a texturalist. I am not a nut.”
— Antonin Scalia, 1997 Wriston Lecture: On Interpreting The Constitution | Manhattan Institute
Tagged: originalist, Texturalist, Nut
“ [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, {{meta.pageTitle}}
Tagged: Supreme Court Decisions, Sodomy, private, Heterosexual, Intercourse
“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
Tagged: Bismarck, Frankfurters, Laws, sausages
“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, {{meta.pageTitle}}
Tagged: Supreme Court Decisions, NEA, Bourgeoisie, épater les bourgeois, Tax, Censorship
“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don't need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box.”
— Antonin Scalia
Tagged: Constitution, discrimination, Sex, legislature, Ballot Box
“[N]ot once in the history of the American Republic has this Court ever suggested the death penalty is categorically impermissible. The reason is obvious: It is impossible to hold unconstitutional that which the Constitution explicitly contemplates. The Fifth Amendment provides that '[n]o person shall be held to answer for a capital…crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury,' and that no person shall be 'deprived of life…without due process of law.'”
— Antonin Scalia, {{meta.pageTitle}}
Tagged: Supreme Court Decisions, Republic, Fifth Amendment, Death Penalty
“The Constitution contains no right to abortion. It is not to be found in the longstanding traditions of our society, nor can it be logically deduced from the text of the Constitution - not, that is, without volunteering a judicial answer to the nonjusticiable question of when human life begins. Leaving this matter to the political process is not only legally correct, it is pragmatically so. That alone - and not lawyerly dissection of federal judicial precedents - can produce compromises satisfying a sufficient mass of the electorate that this deeply felt issue will cease distorting the remainder of our democratic process. The Court should end its disruptive intrusion into this field as soon as possible.”
— Antonin Scalia
Tagged: Supreme Court Decisions, Constitution, Democratic Process, Abortion
“The point at which life becomes 'worthless,' and the point at which the means necessary to preserve it become 'extraordinary' or 'inappropriate,' are neither set forth in the Constitution nor known to the nine Justices of this Court any better than they are known to nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory...[therefore] even when it is demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that a patient no longer wishes certain measures to be taken to preserve her life, it is up to the citizens of Missouri to decide, through their elected representatives, whether that wish will be honored.”
— Antonin Scalia, Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health- Wikipedia
Tagged: Supreme Court Decisions, Abortion, right to life, Pro Choice, Kansas City
“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, A Call for Reckoning: Religion and the Death Penalty
Tagged: Supreme Court Decisions, Roe V. Wade, Abortion, Constitution
“You're looking at me as though I'm weird. My god! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the devil! It's in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the devil! Most of mankind has believed in the devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the devil.”
— Antonin Scalia, In Conversation: Antonin Scalia
Tagged: The Devil, gospel, Jesus Christ, America
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