Best quotes by Antonin Scalia on Constitution

Checkout quotes by Antonin Scalia on Constitution

  • The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.
    - Antonin Scalia
  • We have laws against torture. The Constitution says nothing whatever about torture. It speaks of punishment; 'cruel and unusual' punishments are forbidden.
    - Antonin Scalia
  • What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional?
    - Antonin Scalia
  • If there's anything you absolutely hate, why, it must be unconstitutional. Or, if there's anything you absolutely have to have, it must be required by the Constitution. That's where we are. That is utterly mindless.
    - Antonin Scalia
  • There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.
    - Antonin Scalia
  • My view is regardless of whether you think prohibiting abortion is good or whether you think prohibiting abortion is bad, regardless of how you come out on that, my only point is the Constitution does not say anything about it. It leaves it up to democratic choice.
    - Antonin Scalia
  • But I'm not pro death penalty. I - I'm just anti the notion that it is not a matter for democratic choice, that it has been taken away from the democratic choice of the people by a provision of the Constitution.
    - Antonin Scalia
  • If you are sentenced to torture for a crime, yes, that is a cruel punishment. But the mere fact that somebody is tortured is - is unlawful under - under our statutes, but the Constitution happens not to address it, just as it does not address a lot of other horrible things.
    - Antonin Scalia