Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Antonin Scalia
Age: 79 †
Born: 1936
Born: March 11
Died: 2016
Died: February 13
Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States
Judge
Lawyer
Professor
Trenton
New Jersey
Antonin Gregory Scalia
Scalia
Antonin G. Scalia
Find
Melting
Come
Surgery
Must
Execution
Method
Least
Causes
Pain
Doe

More quotes by Antonin Scalia

Image
Scalia said the court had pretty much signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, adding: Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means.
Antonin Scalia
Image
I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion.
Antonin Scalia
Image
To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.
Antonin Scalia
Image
It would be gross understatement to say that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not a model of clarity. It is in many important respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self-contradiction.
Antonin Scalia
Image
A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.
Antonin Scalia
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.
Antonin Scalia
Image
A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.
Antonin Scalia
Image
If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility.
Antonin Scalia
Image
Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?
Antonin Scalia
Image
Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't.
Antonin Scalia
Image
When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted?
Antonin Scalia
Image
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
Image
[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
Image
Campaign promises are - by long democratic tradition - the least binding form of human commitment.
Antonin Scalia
Image
You could have 50 different states having 50 different regulations... until they were all litigated out.
Antonin Scalia
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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