Quotes from Robert Bork

[The current governing judicial philosophy is:] If you want something passionately enough, it is guaranteed by the Constitution. No need to fiddle around gathering votes from recalcitrant citizens.

No church that panders to the zeitgeist deserves respect, and very shortly it will not get respect, except from those who find it politically useful, and that is less respect than disguised contempt.

The First Amendment is about how we govern ourselves - not about how we titillate ourselves sexually.

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.

The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.

As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago.

An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement.

No activity that society thinks immoral is victimless. Knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral.

The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.

Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept.

Reporters treat religion as beneath mention, as personally distasteful, or as a clear and present threat to the American way of life.

The right to procreate is not guaranteed, explicitly or implicitly, by the Constitution.

I was thinking of resigning since I did not want to be perceived as a man who did the president's bidding to save my job. I have had some time to think about it since. I think I did the right thing

If the children already born each have only two children themselves ... in twenty-seven to thirty-five years the population of the world will double.

Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.

When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.

It is a ship with a great deal of sail but a very shallow keel.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.