Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomasis an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Thomas succeeded Thurgood Marshall and is the second African American to serve on the court...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSupreme Court Justice
Date of Birth23 June 1948
CityPin Point, GA
CountryUnited States of America
Clarence Thomas quotes about
confused sacrifice thinking
Perhaps some are confused because they have stereotypes of how blacks should be and I respectfully decline, as I did in my youth, to sacrifice who I am for who they think I should be.
cynical negative saws
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.
dream country library
I would walk into the Carnegie Library and I would see the pictures of Booker T. and pictures of Frederick Douglass and I would read. I would go into the Savannah Public Libraries in the stacks and see all of the newspapers from all over the country. Did I dream that I would be on the Supreme Court? No. But I dreamt that there was a world out there that was worth pursuing.
religious freedom practice
Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.
years discrimination illegal
I agree with the (Supreme Court's) holding that racial discrimination in higher education admissions will be illegal in 25 years. They are illegal now.
school mean black
[T]he courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.... The mere fact that a school is black does not mean that it is the product of an unconstitutional violation.
rights civil-rights civil-rights-act
We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
decided sometime work
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.
cease people
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.
affected people self-esteem
I hear people say it affected your self-esteem to be segregated. It never affected mine.
people
There are so many people who have this idea of who I am because I'm black.
american-judge government legitimacy properly 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.
based box certain judgments people supposed
It's fascinating that people, there's so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like. I'm black. So I'm supposed to think a certain way. I'm supposed to have certain opinions. I don't do that. You don't create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them.
catholic minority
I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA.