The Almost Perfect State (1921)
Context: We have always been compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our observation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the radicals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-for-nothings, the sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know any of them, far less become intimate with them.
“In Barnette, we held that a public school student could not be compelled to recite the Pledge; we did not even hint that she could not be compelled to observe respectful silence.... Logically, that ought to be the next target for the Court's bulldozer.”
On the Pledge of Allegiance: Lee v. Weisman (1992) (dissenting).
1990s
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Antonin Scalia 100
former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United… 1936–2016Related quotes
Source: Epigrams, p. 354
Part V: More Rage. More Rage., page 184.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Context: The shootings are a direct assault on the American Dream- which is why they are so disturbing. The fear reflects how unsettling and piercing the crime is. And the fear reflects a still-censored recognition that the shootings have widespread sympathy among students, and that any student, at any school, could be next.
Source: Essays Including Essays, First & Second Series, English Traits, Nature & Considerations by the Way
letter to the German rulers (1524), as quoted in The History of Compulsory Education in New England, John William Perrin, 1896
Advertisement, N.Y. Herald Tribune (August 19, 1946)
“His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect.”
"Ministers of Grace"
The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)