Antonin Scalia quotes

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

Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything - it can stop the Vietnam War, it can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.

A man who has made no enemies is probably not a very good man.

It is not rational, never mind 'appropriate,' to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits.

If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.

To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.

Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything - it can stop the Vietnam War, it can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.

In a big family the first child is kind of like the first pancake. If it's not perfect, that's okay, there are a lot more coming along.

I do accept that, with - with respect to those vague terms in the Constitution such as equal protection of the laws, due process of law, cruel and unusual punishments. I fully accept that those things have to apply to new phenomena that didn't exist at the time.

I attack ideas. I don't attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don't want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel.

The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.

If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.

The court makes an amazing amount of decisions that ought to be made by the people.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.