Robert Bork Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.

Robert Bork
When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions

Robert Bork
The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review; and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left.

Robert Bork
The right to procreate is not guaranteed, explicitly or implicitly, by the Constitution

Robert Bork
The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.

Robert Bork
Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.

Robert Bork
No activity that society thinks immoral is victimless. Knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral.

Robert Bork
Americans revere both the Constitution and an independent Court that applies the document's provisions. The Court has done many excellent things in our history, and few people are willing to see its power broken. The difficulty with all proposals to respond to the Court when it behaves unconstitutionally is that they would create a power to destroy the Court's essential work as well.

Robert Bork
[The] National Rifle Association is always arguing that the Second Amendment determines the right to bear arms. But I think it really is the people's right to bear arms in a militia. The NRA thinks it protects their right to have Teflon-coated bullets. But that's not the original understanding.

Robert Bork
Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

Robert Bork
The judge's authority derives entirely from the fact that he is applying the law and not his personal values. That is why the American public accepts the decisions of its courts, accepts even decisions that nullify the laws a majority of the electorate or their representatives voted for.

Robert Bork
In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.

Robert Bork
The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings.

Robert Bork
One of the uses of history is to free us of a falsely imagined past. The less we know of how ideas actually took root and grew, the more apt we are to accept them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of the world in which we move.

Robert Bork