Quotes from Antonin Scalia

My father made no such division between faith and reason. He understood that the act of faith does not mean the end of thought.

In other words, we are not writing a treatise on legislation or on the law of contracts or, for that matter, on the Constitution. Our subject is solely interpretation: how a legal message is to be received by those who must apply its directives.

Dad also treasured the Church's beauty. Some years ago, then-Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) observed that one of the most convincing demonstrations of the Catholic Church's truth is "the beauty that the faith has generated." That statement by a man of such intellectual standing might surprise us because we tend to associate beauty with feelings and not with truth.

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 today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.

You could have 50 different states having 50 different regulations... until they were all litigated out.

If you're going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you're probably doing something wrong.

By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition.

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.

If I had to choose, I would always take the less dynamic, indeed even the lazy person who knows what's right than the zealot in the cause of error. He may move slower, but he's headed in the right direction.

A good, hard-hitting dissent keeps you honest.

As a young man, you're dazzled by the power of the White House and all that. But power tends to corrupt.

I used to say that the Constitution is not a living document. It's dead, dead, dead. But I've gotten better. I no longer say that. The truth is that the Constitution is not one that morphs. It's an enduring Constitution, not a changing Constitution. That is what I've meant when I've said that the Constitution is dead.

Some people are inherently likeable. If you're not - work on it. It may even improve your social life.

It's not up to the courts to invent new minorities that get special protections.

A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.

I am something of a contrarian, I suppose. I feel less comfortable when everybody agrees with me. I say, 'I better reexamine my position!' I probably believe that the worst opinions in my court have been unanimous. Because there's nobody on the other side pointing out all the flaws.

The right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the unalienable rights with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims 'all Men are endowed by their Creator.'

What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional?

And what I would say now is, yes, if a state enacted a law permitting flogging, it is immensely stupid, but it is not unconstitutional. A lot of stuff that's stupid is not unconstitutional.

If you condemn someone who has committed a crime to be tortured, that would be unconstitutional.

I would not like to be replaced by someone who immediately sets about undoing what I've tried to do for 25-26 years.

Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?