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 Quote

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.
- Clarence Thomas Quote

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 Quote

Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
- Clarence Thomas Quote

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

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 Quote

I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
- Clarence Thomas Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Clarence Thomas Quote

I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system.
- Clarence Thomas Quote

I' been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings.
- Clarence Thomas Quote

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 Quote

The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.
- Clarence Thomas Quote

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.
- Clarence Thomas Quote

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