Quotes from Antonin Scalia

I think I'm a pretty nice fella.

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

I'm not a scientist. That's why I don't want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth.

The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment - in deterrence, and perhaps most of all in the meting out of condign justice for horrible crimes - outweighs the risk of error.

Like other human institutions, courts and juries are not perfect. One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly.

A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.

Winning and losing, that's never been my objective. It's my hope that in the fullness of time, the majority of the court will come to see things as I do.

Originalism says that when you consult the text, you give it the meaning it had when it was adopted, not some later modern meaning.

The Imperial Judiciary lives. It is instructive to compare this Nietzschean vision of us unelected, life-tenured judges—leading a Volk who will be "tested by following," and whose very "belief in themselves" is mystically bound up in their "understanding" of a Court that "speak[s] before all others for their constitutional ideals"—with the somewhat more modest role envisioned for these lawyers by the Founders.

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.

If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility.

If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.

Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character.

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.

Anyone who worked with him will recall the moment when his face softened into a knowing smile. It was the moment he thought he had the answer. That smile was the same smile he wore when he wrote an opinion that wrote itself. He loved the truth, and his smile betrayed the peace and joy he found in its pursuit.

The fallacy that passes for truth by the mere frequency of its repetition is a particular peril for lawyers working in the common-law system. Like all men and women, we are comfortable with familiar formulations, and in addition are trained to follow what has been said before. It is sometimes worth pausing to consider whether it has been said aright.

God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools...and He has not been disappointed.

Avant-garde artistes such as respondents remain entirely free to épater les bourgeois; they are merely deprived of the additional satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it.

What makes an American…is not the name or the blood or even the place of birth, but the belief in the principles of freedom and equality that this country stands for.

designed to fill the interstices of constitutional text."43 Thus is born, out of false linguistic association, a whole new field of legal inquiry.

In the context of defining victim, an organization that voluntarily takes care of an abused animal can hardly be considered to have suffered loss.

noscitur a sociis

some authorities use this canon at that broad level of generality.1 But we mean something more specific. When several nouns or verbs or adjectives or adverbs—any words—are associated in a context suggesting that the words have something in common, they should be assigned a permissible meaning that makes them similar.

the crucial question becomes which theory of textual interpretation is compatible with democracy. Originalism unquestionably is. Nonoriginalism, by contrast, imposes on society statutory prescriptions that were never democratically adopted.