Antonin Scalia Short Quotes

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I think too many promising young minds are wasted on it.
On college graduates considering law as a career

Antonin Scalia
Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity.

Antonin Scalia
Bork has essentially given up. I'm not ready to throw in the towel.

Antonin Scalia
This is so absurd that it has, to my knowledge, never been contemplated.

Antonin Scalia
Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.

Antonin Scalia
Campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment.

Antonin Scalia
People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.

Antonin Scalia
The Court's opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail consisting of two parts patent falsity.

Antonin Scalia
Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible.

Antonin Scalia
It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.

Antonin Scalia
Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State".

Antonin Scalia
The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.

Antonin Scalia
Since [Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S.], I have acquired new wisdom...or, to put it more critically, have discarded old ignorance

Antonin Scalia
We were both devout Catholics, and being a devout Catholic means you have children when God gives them to you, and you raise them.

Antonin Scalia
'The operation was a success, but the patient died.' What such a procedure is to medicine, the Court's opinion in this case is to law.

Antonin Scalia
The Court must be living in another world. Day by day, case by case, it is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize

Antonin Scalia
A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.

Antonin Scalia
If you care passionately about something has become the only test to determine if something is constitutional. How passionately do you care?

Antonin Scalia
You could fire a grapefruit out of a cannon over the best law schools in the country - and that includes Chicago - and not hit an originalist.

Antonin Scalia
Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty.

Antonin Scalia
I don't think it's a living document, I think it's dead. More precisely, I think it's enduring. It doesn't change. I think that needs to be orthodoxy.

Antonin Scalia
Among the questions considered nonjusticiable is the definition of an impeachable offense. Whatever Congress says is an impeachable offense is an impeachable offense.

Antonin Scalia
Evidently, the governing standard is to be what might be called the unfettered wisdom of a majority of this Court, revealed to an obedient people on a case-by-case basis.

Antonin Scalia
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
Judges who find Constitutional rights the Framers never intended take important issues out of the public space of democratic debate and suspend them in a sort of legal formaldehyde.

Antonin Scalia
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