Top 60 Antonin Scalia Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change.”

— Antonin Scalia

2. “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.”

— Antonin Scalia

3. “Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society. We are fools for Christ’s sake. We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world.”

— Antonin Scalia

4. “A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.”

— Antonin Scalia

5. “Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.”

— Antonin Scalia

6. “Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.”

— Antonin Scalia

7. “Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.”

— Antonin Scalia

8. “I attack ideas. I don’t attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas.”

— Antonin Scalia

9. “Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and pass a law. That’s what democracy is all about. It’s not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.”

— Antonin Scalia

10. “A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.”

— Antonin Scalia

11. “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.”

— Antonin Scalia

12. “One can be sophisticated and believe in God. Reason and intellect are not to be laid aside where matters of religion are concerned.”

— Antonin Scalia

13. “Tyrannies have long lists of rights. What they do not have is structural restraints on the power of government.”

— Antonin Scalia

14. “There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.”

— Antonin Scalia

15. “Campaign promises are – by long democratic tradition – the least binding form of human commitment.”

— Antonin Scalia

16. “As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to ‘do what the people want,’ instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.”

— Antonin Scalia

17. “The court’s job is to uphold the Constitution and you don’t call that off in times of crisis. Would the framers have allowed this practice?”

— Antonin Scalia

18. “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.”

— Antonin Scalia

19. “On this day, when we’re celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage – to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it’s a good idea.”

— Antonin Scalia

20. “To invoke alien law when it agrees with one’s own thinking, and ignore it otherwise, is not reasoned decisionmaking, but sophistry.”

— Antonin Scalia

21. “In the eyes of government we are just one race here. It is American.”

— Antonin Scalia

22. “People look at rights as if they were muscles – the more you exercise them, the better they get.”

— Antonin Scalia

23. “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.”

— Antonin Scalia

24. “It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.”

— Antonin Scalia

25. “This is so absurd that it has, to my knowledge, never been contemplated.”

— Antonin Scalia

26. “The Constitution does not trust judges to make determinations of criminal guilt.”

— Antonin Scalia

27. “I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.”

— Antonin Scalia

28. “Why can’t the state accede to the public’s wishes?”

— Antonin Scalia

29. “The attitude of people associating guns with nothing but crime, that is what has to be changed. I grew up at a time when people were not afraid of people with firearms.”

— Antonin Scalia

30. “To many Americans, everything from the Easter morning to the Ascension had to be made up by the groveling enthusiasts as part of their plan to get themselves martyred.”

— Antonin Scalia

31. “Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act’s limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.”

— Antonin Scalia

32. “What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?”

— Antonin Scalia

33. “For in order for capitalism to work – in order for it to produce a good and a stable society – the traditional Christian virtues are essential.”

— Antonin Scalia

34. “You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.”

— Antonin Scalia

35. “But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.”

— Antonin Scalia

36. “Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything-it can stop the Vietnam War. It can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.”

— Antonin Scalia

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

— Antonin Scalia

38. “Jiggery-pokery.”

— Antonin Scalia

39. “Certainly one cannot ban cross burning in the sanctity of his bedroom.”

— Antonin Scalia

40. “In 1905, the Supreme Court of the United States applied the rule to the country’s founding document: “The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted it means now.”

— Antonin Scalia

41. “A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.”

— Antonin Scalia

42. “This is an execution, not surgery. Where does that come from, that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain?”

— Antonin Scalia

43. “Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?”

— Antonin Scalia

44. “The government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.”

— Antonin Scalia

45. “A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.”

— Antonin Scalia

46. “When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted?”

— Antonin Scalia

47. “It would also be strange to find in the midst of a catalog of the rights of individuals a provision securing to the states the right to maintain a designated “Militia.” Dispassionate scholarship suggests quite strongly that the right of the people to keep and bear arms meant just that.”

— Antonin Scalia

48. “It’s a long, uphill fight to get back to original orthodoxy. We have two ‘originalists’ on the Supreme Court. That’s something.”

— Antonin Scalia

49. “By judicial conservative, I mean a judge who does not advance any political or policy preferences, but whose approach to constitutional and statutory interpretation involves fidelity to the text of the Constitution and adherence to the original understanding of that document or to the intent of its drafters.”

— Antonin Scalia

50. “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.”

— Antonin Scalia