Quotes by Clarence Thomas

• I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.
• Any discrimination, like sharp turns in a road, becomes critical because of the tremendous speed at which we are traveling into the high-tech world of a service economy.
• But I know that the vote of 9 out of 10 black Americans for the Democratic Party or for leftist kinds of policies just is not reflective of their opinions.
• But what I believe is that if a person's individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don't issue mandates to businesses that you've got to do this and you've got to do that.
• Even as someone who's labeled a conservative - I'm a Republican I'm black, I'm heading up this organization in the Reagan administration - I can say that conservatives don't exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they're welcome.
• Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
• I do think that our freedoms are at risk.
• I don't know one of my friends who is considered a conservative who has not had to go back and thoroughly think through everything. You do a lot of soul-searching - 'cause we are not going to win any popularity contests.
• I have to admit that I'm one of those people that thinks the dishwasher is a miracle.
• And I don't think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there's another set of moral codes, but I don't think government has a role.
• I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist.
• I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes.
• I think, though, if I had to look at the role of government and what it does in people's lives, I see the EEOC as having much more legitimacy than the others, if properly run.
• I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system.
• I' been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings.
• It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I'm supposed to think.
• Oh, I don't think Tom Sowell would tell anybody to join the administration. That's not his style. But I think his attitude has always been if it had to be done he'd prefer me to do it than somebody else.
• The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.
• The thing that bothered me when I was in college was that I saw myself rejecting the way of life that got me to where I was.
• We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
• When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.
• I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
• I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.