Clarence Thomas Quotes

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1991

Clarence Thomas (born 23 June 1948) is an American judge who serves as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He is the second African American to serve on the nation's highest court.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.

Ronald Reagan isn't the problem. Former president Jimmy Carter was not the problem. The lack of black leadership is the problem

These guys are sitting there watching the destruction of our race while arguing about Ronald Reagan

The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns. Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America’s newspapers.

As for the matter of my judicial philosophy, I didn't have one - and sure didn't want one. A philosophy that is imposed from without instead of arising organically from day to day engagement with the law isn't worth having. Such a philosophy runs the risk of becoming an ideology, and I'd spent much of my adult life shying away from abstract ideological theories that served only to obscure the reality of life as it's lived.

For years my brother and I would ask ourselves how a man could show no interest in his own children. I still wonder.

As a child in the deep South, I’d grown-up fearing the lynch mobs...as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’ve been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington DC where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.