Clarence Thomas Quotes

Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.

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

The only people who have quick answers don't have the responsibility of making the decisions.

A judge should be evaluated by whether he faithfully upholds his oath to God, not to the people, to the state or to the Constitution.

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

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.

It takes a person with a mission to succeed.

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

I love being around people who work with their hands, who do the hard things to keep our country going. They're just my kind of people.

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

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

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.

In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well, today's decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter.

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.

The truth of the matter is we have become more interested in designer jeans and break dancing than we are in obligations and responsibilities.

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

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.

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.

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.

I was never a liberal. I was radical. I was cynical. I was negative. But, I was never a liberal. I always saw that as too lukewarm for me.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes.

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

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.

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.

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

I do think that our freedoms are at risk.

I agree with the (Supreme Court's) holding that racial discrimination in higher education admissions will be illegal in 25 years. They are illegal now.

Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.

I don't really have the luxury to be bitter. I don't have the luxury of having negative things in my life.