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Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

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
Meaning
Words
Doesn
Change

More quotes by Antonin Scalia

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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
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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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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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The principal purpose of stare decisis is to protect reliance interest and further stability in the law.
Antonin Scalia
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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
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I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.
Antonin Scalia
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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
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Campaign promises are - by long democratic tradition - the least binding form of human commitment.
Antonin Scalia
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Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is established by the State.
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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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
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We should start calling this law SCOTUScare ... [T]his Court's two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years ... And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.
Antonin Scalia
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A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.
Antonin Scalia
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If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?
Antonin Scalia
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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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[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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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
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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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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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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