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" Unfortunately, the reality was that, for political reasons or whatever, there was a need to enforce antidiscrimination laws, or at least there was a perceived need to do that. "

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" You have a number of choices. You could continue to always fight against people who are really distractions. They're people in the cheap seats of life. Or you can do what you went there to do. "

Clarence Thomas

Cheap

Choices

You

" There are so many people who have this idea of who I am because I'm black. "

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

" 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

Never

Work

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

" 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. "

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

" My grandfather was a man, when he talked about freedom, his attitude was really interesting. His view was that you had obligations or you had responsibilities, and when you fulfilled those obligations or responsibilities, that then gave you the liberty to do other things. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. "

" 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. "

" It would seem that some black people want to say that when you, as a black, become successful, you cease to be black. That's ridiculous. "

" 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. "

" 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'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

People

Wrong

" 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. "

" My grandparents had died in 1983, and suddenly my brother is out jogging before Mass, and he dies. "

" I disagree with the prevailing point of view of some black leaders that special treatment for blacks is acceptable. "

" 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

Speeches

Almost

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

Clarence Thomas

Way

People

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

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

Clarence Thomas

Before

Rights

" You didn't think of angels as white or black. They were angels. "

" 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. "

" 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, 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. "

" 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. "