Quotes from Clarence Thomas

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.

I went into the seminary when I was 16.

I hear people say it affected your self-esteem to be segregated. It never affected mine.

It would seem that some black people want to say that when you, as a black, become successful, you cease to be black. That's ridiculous.

My grandparents had died in 1983, and suddenly my brother is out jogging before Mass, and he dies.

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

It's fascinating that people, there's so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like. I'm black. So I'm supposed to think a certain way. I'm supposed to have certain opinions. I don't do that. You don't create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them.

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

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.

Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.

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

It takes a person with a mission to succeed.

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.

I still have a 15¢ sticker on the frame of my law degree. It's tainted, so I just leave it in the basement.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.