Top 40 Elie Mystal Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Instead of going higher, instead of looking at the ideals the Reconstruction Amendments represent, originalists again try to hobble them by limiting them to what dead white people may have thought.”

— Elie Mystal

2. “Never accept the conservative interpretation of the Constitution. Never accept the conservative limitations placed on our political, civil, and social rights. They have literally always been wrong, and they are wrong now. Justice is not one constitutional option among many – it is a requirement of a free and equal society. Demand nothing less.”

— Elie Mystal

3. “Hiram Revels, Blanche K. Bruce, Edward Brooke, Carol Moseley Braun, Barack Obama, Roland W. Burris, Tim Scott, William “Mo” Cowan, Cory A. Booker, Kamala D. Harris, Raphael Warnock: that is the full and complete list of African Americans to serve in the United States Senate in the history of this country.”

— Elie Mystal

4. “Ain’t that something? To amend the structure of the Senate the people who most benefit from its bigotry have to first agree to give up their advantage. Tell me this document wasn’t written by slavers and colonists who knew exactly the kind of white supremacist society they were trying to write into existence.”

— Elie Mystal

5. “Refusing to do your job because the person paying you to do it has different beliefs than you is not a religious objection, it’s plain and simple bigotry.”

— Elie Mystal

6. “Justice is not one constitutional option among many – it is a requirement of a free and equal society. Demand nothing less.”

— Elie Mystal

7. “To call white people a suspect class is to render the entire phrase meaningless.”

— Elie Mystal

8. “We have more rights than those that are explicitly conferred in the Constitution. The Constitution says so!”

— Elie Mystal

9. “The Second Amendment could be rewritten to say “White Supremacy, being necessary to the security of a free State, the rights of white people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” without any appreciable difference to the laws and the rights of gun ownership as currently experienced.”

— Elie Mystal

10. “A world where the federal government couldn’t restrict the freedom of the press, but Georgia could, was something that people actually believed for a long time, and is a world that still exists on the margins today.”

— Elie Mystal

11. “The law is not science; it’s jazz. It’s a series of iterations based off a few consistent beats.”

— Elie Mystal

12. “You just don’t get it, do you.”

— Elie Mystal

13. “In a controversial 5–4 decision, the liberal wing of the court, joined by Anthony Kennedy, ruled that taking private property and then selling it to private interests for economic redevelopment was indeed a constitutional use of the government’s eminent domain power.”

— Elie Mystal

14. “In a direct response to African Americans patrolling Oakland, California, and “copwatching,” Republicans in California passed the Mulford Act, which banned open carry of loaded firearms in California. Who signed that law? Republican patron saint and then governor of California Ronald Reagan. The absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment is new, but using gun rights or gun control, as necessary, to maintain racial dominance is old.”

— Elie Mystal

15. “Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all.”

— Elie Mystal

16. “You can’t make Freddy Krueger friendly by giving him a new hat.”

— Elie Mystal

17. “Conservatives never win when everybody gets to play.”

— Elie Mystal

18. “If you think of the Bill of Rights like a hostage video, the first eight are Madison saying, “They are treating me well. I am being fed and receiving medical treatment for my injuries.” The last two are when he blinks out “They electrocuted my testicles” in Morse code before they cut the feed.”

— Elie Mystal

19. “Without commanding a single troop or passing a single bill, a conservative Supreme Court is not a check on the other branches of government, but a check on progress itself. We can move only as far and as fast as the nine unelected and unaccountable justices on the Court allow us to.”

— Elie Mystal

20. “Video gamers would call the Bill of Rights a “day one patch,” and they’re a good indication that the developers didn’t have enough time to work out all the kinks.”

— Elie Mystal

21. “Clearing out “the slums” and replacing run-down and dilapidated-looking buildings with fresh, shiny, economically productive buildings and infrastructure sounds like a great plan, unless you are the person being cleared out.”

— Elie Mystal

22. “It was repealed by voter referendum, and 40 percent of the people voted to keep the law banning interracial marriages.”

— Elie Mystal

23. “If the Second Amendment has evolved to incorporate the right to self-defense, surely it’s evolved to allow us to make it harder for people to kill themselves or their spouses.”

— Elie Mystal

24. “If the Fifth Amendment recognizes the right against self-incrimination, then we should stop asking people to incriminate themselves. Why is that hard to understand?”

— Elie Mystal

25. “Equality and fairness must meet the standards of our modern definitions of those ideals, or else the entire American experiment is illegitimate.”

— Elie Mystal

26. “White people complaining of “reverse racism” need to help themselves to a number and stand at the back of the line. White people are still too busy legislating bigotry against actual minorities and trying to manipulate the equal protection clause to justify it. Let’s fix that first, and then we can talk about various “economic grievances.”

— Elie Mystal

27. “But I bring up my background in the law because hatred is a pretty big reason I’ve written this book. Not the healthiest emotion, I know, but for me it’s clarifying.”

— Elie Mystal

28. “A constitutional right that people have no way of accessing through litigation is just, like, a suggestion.”

— Elie Mystal

29. “The supposed rights of the unborn hold no moral suasion in a society that is willing to consign children who are born alive to poverty, malnutrition, and toxic air and water.”

— Elie Mystal

30. “The current Supreme Court has more in common with the court in Plessy than the court in Loving. The only real difference between conservatives in 1896 and the ones we have today is that the Federalist Society teaches them how to edit out their bigoted slurs.”

— Elie Mystal

31. “They simply wanted Phillips to accept payment for services he started an entire business to render. Phillips’s claim that his religious freedom would be compromised by being forced to engage in his own business is ludicrous on its face. Refusing to do your job because the person paying you to do it has different beliefs than you is not a religious objection, it’s plain and simple bigotry. The Colorado.”

— Elie Mystal

32. “In a civilized country, an officer’s inability to tell the difference between an eighteen-year-old Black kid and a demonic giant on steroids would be grounds for immediate dismissal from the force. In a just world, an officer who shot and killed an eighteen-year-old unarmed kid and then admitted in sworn testimony that he briefly thought he was fighting Hellboy would be tried and convicted of manslaughter.”

— Elie Mystal

33. “Say what you will about the Draconian Code of Athens, but at least it’s an ethos.”

— Elie Mystal

34. “Republicans are right to go to the mattresses every time one of these openings come up, and Democrats have been fools not to adopt the same tactics.”

— Elie Mystal

35. “Always remember, the arch-conservative view of the law trumpeted by the Federalist Society is a minority opinion. It’s a minority opinion in law school, in academia, and within the legal profession writ large. Anything that can be done to drown out conservative voices on the Court should be done, and the quickest and easiest way to do that is simply to add more voices.”

— Elie Mystal

36. “Thomas, and the rest of the conservatives, absolutely believe substantive due process exists; they just think the Fourteenth Amendment is hiding rights for businesses they think are people, instead of minorities they wish were not.”

— Elie Mystal

37. “As long as white people make up a plurality of voters in a state, and as long as white people stick together in that state, white people get to control both of the state’s allotted senators.”

— Elie Mystal

38. “There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn’t to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery.”

— Elie Mystal

39. “They did not want Phillips to put himself inside the cake and jump out and scream “I love gay people” at an opportune moment.”

— Elie Mystal

40. “Constitutional protections of speech are mainly concerned with the government’s attempts to silence or punish views the ruling party doesn’t like. The Constitution cares about people limiting the inquiry of a free press through lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits. It cares about armed agents of the state threatening or jailing citizens who dare to protest the actions of that state. In short, the First Amendment cares about the things Republicans do when they control the government.”

— Elie Mystal

41. “Looking to Jim Crow–era white society for guidance on how to bring about racial equality, of all things, is insane.”

— Elie Mystal

42. “A white person who knows that the cops are there to protect her privilege, not enforce the law and keep the peace.”

— Elie Mystal

43. “It’s all really a game of thrones, if you will. And our founders were more Lannister than Stark: just a bunch of rich people rebelling against a “mad king,” who weren’t really interested in freeing anybody but themselves.”

— Elie Mystal

44. “To not do so because some old dead white people didn’t have the knowledge or decency to do the same is not an alternative theory of legal interpretation. It’s the promulgation of evil hiding behind the banality of cowardice.”

— Elie Mystal

45. “Indiana is weird.”

— Elie Mystal