Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Antonin Scalia
Antonin Scalia Quotes
85 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that 'established by the State' means 'established by the State or the Federal Government,' the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as "inartful drafting.' This Court, however, has no free-floating power 'to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.'
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State".
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I frankly doubt, moreover, whether the fiercely proud men who adopted our Fourth Amendment would have allowed themselves to be subjected, on mere suspicion of being armed and dangerous, to such indignity
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Today's decision is the pinnacle of our Eighth Amendment death-is-different jurisprudence. Not only does it, like all of that jurisprudence, find no support in the text or history of the Eighth Amendment; it does not even have support in current social attitudes regarding the conditions that render an otherwise just death penalty inappropriate. Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
Life is too short to pursue every human act to its most remote consequences; "for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost" is a commentary on fate, not the statement of a major cause of action against a blacksmith.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
Today's judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the identity of the flying public), applies for a driver's license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
Campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
Justice White's conclusion is perhaps correct, if one assumes that the task of a court of law is to plumb the intent of the particular Congress that enacted a particular provision. That methodology is not mine nor, I think, the one that courts have traditionally followed. It is our task, as I see it, not to enter the minds of the Members of Congress - who need have nothing in mind in order for their votes to be both lawful and effective - but rather to give fair and reasonable meaning to the text of the United States Code, adopted by various Congresses at various times.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
How frightening it must be to have your own independent counsel and staff appointed, with nothing else to do but to investigate you until investigation is no longer worthwhile.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
In law school, I never understood [antitrust law]. I later found out, in reading the writings of those who now do understand it, that I should not have understood it because it did not make any sense then.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
[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
Source
Report...
Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
If to state this case is not to decide it, the law has departed further from the meaning of language than is appropriate for a government that is supposed to rule (and to be restrained) through the written word.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
Today's extension of the Edwards prohibition is the latest stage of prophylaxis built upon prophylaxis, producing a veritable fairyland castle of imagined constitutional restriction upon law enforcement.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I have been willing, in the case of civil statutes, to acknowledge a doctrine of scrivener's error that permits a court to give an unusual (though not unheard of) meaning to a word which, if given its normal meaning, would produce an absurd and arguably unconstitutional result.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards—and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures. Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent. Words have no meaning if the views of less than 50 percent of death penalty States can constitute a national consensus. Our previous cases have required overwhelming opposition to a challenged practice, generally over a long period of time.
Antonin Scalia
Source
Report...
One will search in vain the document we are supposed to be construing for text that provides the basis for the argument over these distinctions, and will find in our society's tradition regarding abortion no hint that the distinctions are constitutionally relevant, much less any indication how a constitutional argument about them ought to be resolved. The random and unpredictable results of our consequently unchanneled individual views make it increasingly evident, Term after Term, that the tools for this job are not to be found in the lawyer's - and hence not in the judge's - workbox. I continue to dissent from [the Court's] enterprise of devising an Abortion Code, and from the illusion that we have authority to do so.
Antonin Scalia
1
2
3
4
Quote of the day
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly … very slowly.
Gypsy Rose Lee
Antonin Scalia
Creative Commons
Born:
March 11, 1936
Died:
February 13, 2016
(aged 79)
Bio:
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016.
Most used words:
law
court
constitution
power
meaning
case
people
constitutional
states
tradition
opinion
death
amendment
jury
congress
Antonin Scalia on Wikipedia
Antonin Scalia works on Wikisource
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Antonin Scalia Quotes
Antonin Scalia Short Quotes
Quotes about Antonin Scalia
American Judge Quotes
Judge Quotes
20th-century Judge Quotes
Related People
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
American Judge
Clarence Thomas
American Judge
Samuel Alito
American Judge
Anthony Kennedy
American Jurist
John Roberts
American Jurist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes