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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

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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
Method
Least
Causes
Pain
Doe
Find
Melting
Come
Surgery
Must
Execution

More quotes by Antonin Scalia

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If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag. But I am not king.
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[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
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People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.
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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
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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
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[If critics of the Pledge of Allegiance persuaded the public it should be changed] then we could eliminate under God from the Pledge of Allegiance, that could be democratically done.
Antonin Scalia
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When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted?
Antonin Scalia
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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
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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
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Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.
Antonin Scalia
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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
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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
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Ever so subtly, without even alluding to the last obstacles preserved by earlier opinions that we now push out of our path, we effectively replace the goal of a discrimination-free society with the quite imcompatible goal of proportionate representation by race and by sex in the workplace.
Antonin Scalia
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Campaign promises are - by long democratic tradition - the least binding form of human commitment.
Antonin Scalia
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The principal purpose of stare decisis is to protect reliance interest and further stability in the law.
Antonin Scalia
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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
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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
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The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.
Antonin Scalia
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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
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Why can't the state accede to the public's wishes?
Antonin Scalia