Antonin Scalia Quotes

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Antonin Scalia

Profession : Judge

Birth : March 11, 1936

With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them - with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the 'reasoned judgment' of a bare majority of this Court - we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.

Antonin Scalia

Wringing your hands about states' rights, forget it. They're gone. Basically, the federal government can do whatever it wants. Who's going to protect the states? My court? Ha - we're feds!

Antonin Scalia

The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment - in deterrence, and perhaps most of all in the meting out of condign justice for horrible crimes - outweighs the risk of error.

Antonin Scalia

It is not rational, never mind 'appropriate,' to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits.

Antonin Scalia

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

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

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

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

I watched 'The Sopranos,' I saw a couple of episodes of 'Mad Men.' I loved 'Seinfeld.' In fact, I got some CDs of 'Seinfeld.' 'Seinfeld' was hilarious. Oh, boy. The Nazi soup kitchen? 'No soup for you!'

Antonin Scalia

Like other human institutions, courts and juries are not perfect. One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly.

Antonin Scalia

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

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

Antonin Scalia

More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.

Antonin Scalia

If I had to choose, I would always take the less dynamic, indeed even the lazy person who knows what's right than the zealot in the cause of error. He may move slower, but he's headed in the right direction.

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

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

I'm nervous about our civic culture. I'm not sure the Internet is largely the cause of it. It's certainly the cause of careless writing. People who get used to blurbing things on the Internet are never going to be good writers.

Antonin Scalia

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

Antonin Scalia

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

A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.

Antonin Scalia