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" I hear people say it affected your self-esteem to be segregated. It never affected mine. "

Clarence Thomas

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" I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system. "

Clarence Thomas

" There's a difference between someone who's 'harsh' and someone who is 'hard.' Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard. "

Clarence Thomas

" 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. "

Clarence Thomas

" 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. "

Clarence Thomas

" People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same. "

Clarence Thomas

" 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. "

Clarence Thomas

" I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony. "

Clarence Thomas

" I'd been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings. "

Clarence Thomas

" I've probably given more speeches, been on TV more than any other member of the Court - or almost any other member of the Court. "

Clarence Thomas

" I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights. "

Clarence Thomas

" We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964. "

Clarence Thomas

" I do think that our freedoms are at risk. "

Clarence Thomas

" When I went into the seminary, I was one of those victims of New Math and had not had Algebra I and had no idea what we were doing in New Math in the ninth grade. But when I went into the seminary, they had gone the traditional route and taught first-year algebra. "

Clarence Thomas

" 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. "

Clarence Thomas

" 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. "

Clarence Thomas

" 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. "

Clarence Thomas

" Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot. "

Clarence Thomas

" My grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal. "

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. "

Clarence Thomas

" I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA. "

Clarence Thomas

" I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes. "

Clarence Thomas

" 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. "

Clarence Thomas

" My grandfather, as I said, was industrious. He'd had a variety of jobs and decided sometime in the 1940s that he would never work for anyone. He was also a very independent man. "

Clarence Thomas

" My job is to write opinions. I decide cases and write opinions. It is not to respond to idiocy and critics who make statements that are unfounded. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't have constructive criticisms, but it should be constructive. "

Clarence Thomas

" I grew up in a religious environment, and I'm proud of it. I was going to be a priest; I'm proud of it. And I thank God I believe in God, or I would probably be enormously angry right now. "

Clarence Thomas

" 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. "

Clarence Thomas

" I was never a liberal. I was radical. I was cynical. I was negative. But, I was never a liberal. I always saw that as too lukewarm for me. "

Clarence Thomas

" 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. "

Clarence Thomas

" The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong. "

Clarence Thomas

" I still have a 15¢ sticker on the frame of my law degree. It's tainted, so I just leave it in the basement. "

Clarence Thomas