Look where we are, where now that trust or that belief is gone forever, when you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder. It’s like, kind of an infidelity that you can explain ... but you can’t undo it.

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

ku-klux-klan white wings

I was smart enough to use pot without getting caught, and now I'm on the Supreme Court. If you were stupid enough to get caught, that's your problem. Your appeal is denied. This 40 year sentence just might teach you a lesson.

Clarence Thomas

smart stupid years

Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.

Clarence Thomas

respect government law

I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.

Clarence Thomas

rights philosophy believe

Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.

Clarence Thomas

education integrity inspirational

Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black.

Clarence Thomas

long ideas thinking

A judge should be evaluated by whether he faithfully upholds his oath to God, not to the people, to the state or to the Constitution.

Clarence Thomas

constitution judging people

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

government people thinking

The only people who have quick answers don't have the responsibility of making the decisions.

Clarence Thomas

decision responsibility people

I believe that there is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.... In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice.

Clarence Thomas

equality race believe

Today, now, it is time to move forward, a time to look for what is good in others, what is good in our country. It is time to see what we have in common, what we have to share as human beings and citizens.

Clarence Thomas

citizens country moving

The job of a judge is to figure out what the law says, not what he wants it to say. There is a difference between the role of a judge and that of a policy maker... Judging requires a certain impartiality.

Clarence Thomas

differences law jobs

In my humble opinion, those who come to engage in debates of consequence, and who challenge accepted wisdom, should expect to be treated badly. Nonetheless, they must stand undaunted. That is required. And that should be expected. For it is bravery that is required to secure freedom.

Clarence Thomas

humble bravery courage

Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike

Clarence Thomas

kings mean thinking

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

water kids people

I love being around people who work with their hands, who do the hard things to keep our country going. They're just my kind of people.

Clarence Thomas

love-is country hands

It takes a person with a mission to succeed.

Clarence Thomas

purpose goal inspirational

Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah.

Clarence Thomas

differences race sex

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

fighting writing thinking

It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I'm supposed to think.

Clarence Thomas

bugs years thinking