Clarence Thomas famous quotes

I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Philosophy #Believe #America

Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Inspirational #Education #Integrity

And I don't think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there's another set of moral codes, but I don't think government has a role.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Thinking #Government #People

While the romanticized ideal of universal public education resonates with the cognoscenti who oppose vouchers, poor urban families just want the best education for their children, who will certainly need it to function in our high-tech and advanced society.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Children #Needs #Politics

It takes a person with a mission to succeed.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Inspirational #Goal #Succeed

In my humble opinion, those who come to engage in debates of consequence, and who challenge accepted wisdom, should expect to be treated badly. Nonetheless, they must stand undaunted. That is required. And that should be expected. For it is bravery that is required to secure freedom.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Courage #Humble #Bravery

You have a number of choices. You could continue to always fight against people who are really distractions. They're people in the cheap seats of life. Or you can do what you went there to do.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Fighting #Numbers #People

Unfortunately, the reality was that, for political reasons or whatever, there was a need to enforce antidiscrimination laws, or at least there was a perceived need to do that.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Reality #Law #Political

I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Atlas #Fountainhead

Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike
-- Clarence Thomas

#Kings #Mean #Thinking

Any discrimination, like sharp turns in a road, becomes critical because of the tremendous speed at which we are traveling into the high-tech world of a service economy.
-- Clarence Thomas

#World #Discrimination #Speed

I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Writing #Fighting #Thinking

When I was a kid, we said that we were precluded from going to certain neighborhoods because of the color of our skin Now the neighborhoods are the neighborhoods of ideas, youre not supposed to be there because of the color of your skin.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Kids #Color #Ideas

I do think that our freedoms are at risk.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Thinking #Risk

I have to admit that I'm one of those people that thinks the dishwasher is a miracle.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Thinking #People #Miracle

Perhaps some are confused because they have stereotypes of how blacks should be and I respectfully decline, as I did in my youth, to sacrifice who I am for who they think I should be.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Confused #Sacrifice #Thinking

Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something.  Everybody is sensitive.  If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Sex #Race #Differences

The thing that bothered me when I was in college was that I saw myself rejecting the way of life that got me to where I was.
-- Clarence Thomas

#College #Way #Saws

Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Equality #Race #Government

I believe that there is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.... In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Believe #Equality #Race

If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything-and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Government #Politics #Congress

Long gone is the time when we [blacks] opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and demand conformity to that norm.... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Thinking #Ideas #Long

But I know that the vote of 9 out of 10 black Americans for the Democratic Party or for leftist kinds of policies just is not reflective of their opinions.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Party #Black #Opinion

The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.
-- Clarence Thomas

#People #Black #Way

The absolute worst I have ever been treated, the worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, are by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia.
-- Clarence Thomas

#People #Done #Savannah

My grandfather was a man, when he talked about freedom, his attitude was really interesting. His view was that you had obligations or you had responsibilities, and when you fulfilled those obligations or responsibilities, that then gave you the liberty to do other things.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Attitude #Responsibility #Men

I don't know one of my friends who is considered a conservative who has not had to go back and thoroughly think through everything. You do a lot of soul-searching - 'cause we are not going to win any popularity contests.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Friends #Winning #Thinking

And I thank God I believe in God, or I would probably be enormously angry right now.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Believe #Thank God #Angry

I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Strong #Libertarian #Very Strong

I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Groups #Get Away #Sympathetic

It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I'm supposed to think.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Thinking #Years #Bugs

I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Wings #Ku Klux Klan #White

But what I believe is that if a person's individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don't issue mandates to businesses that you've got to do this and you've got to do that.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Believe #Rights #Issues

So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest
-- Clarence Thomas

#Action #Conversation #Affirmative Action

Even as someone who's labeled a conservative - I'm a Republican I'm black, I'm heading up this organization in the Reagan administration - I can say that conservatives don't exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they're welcome.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Break Up #Organization #Black

My grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Grandmother #People #Grandfather

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Real #School #People

Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Government #Law #Liberty

The White House said today that Judge Clarence Thomas, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, had smoked ***** while in college.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Weed #Marijuana #College

To define each of us by our race is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Race #Humanity #Denial

I would walk into the Carnegie Library and I would see the pictures of Booker T. and pictures of Frederick Douglass and I would read. I would go into the Savannah Public Libraries in the stacks and see all of the newspapers from all over the country. Did I dream that I would be on the Supreme Court? No. But I dreamt that there was a world out there that was worth pursuing.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Dream #Country #Library

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Kids #People #Water

A theory deeply etched in our law [is that] a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Rights #Law #Justice

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Rights #Civil Rights

You didn't think of angels as white or black. They were angels.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Angel #Thinking #White

A good argument diluted to avoid criticism is not nearly as good as the undiluted argument, because we best arrive at truth through a process of honest and vigorous debate. Arguments should not sneak around in disguise, as if dissent were somehow sinister... For it is bravery that is required to secure freedom.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Courage #Truth #Justice

I'd been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Teaching #Self #Helping

The job of a judge is to figure out what the law says, not what he wants it to say. There is a difference between the role of a judge and that of a policy maker... Judging requires a certain impartiality.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Jobs #Law #Differences

Oh, I don't think Tom Sowell would tell anybody to join the administration. That's not his style. But I think his attitude has always been if it had to be done he'd prefer me to do it than somebody else.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Attitude #Thinking #Style

I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Thinking #Hair #Juan

I'm not an Uncle Tom. . .. I'm going to be here for 40 years. For those who don't like it, get over it.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Uncles #Years #Complaining

I was smart enough to use pot without getting caught, and now I'm on the Supreme Court. If you were stupid enough to get caught, that's your problem. Your appeal is denied. This 40 year sentence just might teach you a lesson.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Smart #Stupid #Years

I grew up in a religious environment, and I'm proud of it.
-- Clarence Thomas

#Religious #Proud #Environment