There’s a difference between someone who’s ‘harsh’ and someone who is ‘hard.’ Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard. – Clarence Thomas
I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. – Clarence Thomas
My grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal. – 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. – Clarence Thomas
There’s a difference between someone who’s ‘harsh’ and someone who is ‘hard.’ Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard. In order to respond to that, he had to become a hard man, with very hard rules, very hard discipline for himself, very hard days, hard work, et cetera. – Clarence Thomas
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. – Clarence Thomas
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. – Clarence Thomas
And I thank God I believe in God, or I would probably be enormously angry right now. – Clarence Thomas
I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights. – Clarence Thomas
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. – Clarence Thomas
I think, though, if I had to look at the role of government and what it does in people’s lives, I see the EEOC as having much more legitimacy than the others, if properly run. – Clarence Thomas
But what I believe is that if a person’s individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don’t issue mandates to businesses that you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that. – Clarence Thomas
I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along – where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony. – Clarence Thomas
My grandfather was a man, when he talked about freedom, his attitude was really interesting. His view was that you had obligations or you had responsibilities, and when you fulfilled those obligations or responsibilities, that then gave you the liberty to do other things. – Clarence Thomas
I still have a 15 cents sticker on the frame of my law degree. It’s tainted, so I just leave it in the basement. – Clarence Thomas
My job is to write opinions. I decide cases and write opinions. It is not to respond to idiocy and critics who make statements that are unfounded. That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have constructive criticisms, but it should be constructive. – Clarence Thomas
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. – Clarence Thomas
I have to admit that I’m one of those people that thinks the dishwasher is a miracle. – Clarence Thomas
I think segregation is bad, I think it’s wrong, it’s immoral. I’d fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don’t need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that. – Clarence Thomas
I think Juan stopped short – he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I’m not a nationalist. – Clarence Thomas
I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA. – Clarence Thomas
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. – Clarence Thomas
