Robert Bork Quotes

As the courts keep pushing religion out of sight, the press either ignores it or treats it as some sort of emotional affliction. It is hardly any wonder that religion slowly loses its grip on the popular mind.

There can be no doubt that the systematic hostility of the courts to religion has lowered the prestige of religion in the public mind.

Conservatives ... may decide to join the game and seek activist judges with conservative views. Should that come to pass, those who have tempted the courts to political judging will have gained nothing for themselves but will have destroyed a great and essential institution ... There are only two sides. Either the Constitution and statutes are law, which means their principles are known and control judges, or they are malleable texts that judges may rewrite to see that particular groups or political causes win.

It is a ship with a great deal of sail but a very shallow keel.

Americans revere both the Constitution and an independent Court that applies the document's provisions. The Court has done many excellent things in our history, and few people are willing to see its power broken. The difficulty with all proposals to respond to the Court when it behaves unconstitutionally is that they would create a power to destroy the Court's essential work as well.

No activity that society thinks immoral is victimless. Knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral.

I was thinking of resigning since I did not want to be perceived as a man who did the president's bidding to save my job. I have had some time to think about it since. I think I did the right thing.

When a judge goes beyond [his proper function] and reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of democracy.

By depriving the charged person of any defenses [the rulings] mean that sexual dalliance, however voluntarily engaged in, becomes harassment whenever an employee sees fit, after the fact, so to characterize it.

I don't think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don't study the Constitution itself.

[The current governing judicial philosophy is:] If you want something passionately enough, it is guaranteed by the Constitution. No need to fiddle around gathering votes from recalcitrant citizens.

The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review; and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left.

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.

When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.

An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement.

Now, however, the educational system has become the weapon of choice for modern liberals in their project of dismantling American culture.

As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago.

Reporters treat religion as beneath mention, as personally distasteful, or as a clear and present threat to the American way of life.

Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.

[The] National Rifle Association is always arguing that the Second Amendment determines the right to bear arms. But I think it really is the people's right to bear arms in a militia. The NRA thinks it protects their right to have Teflon-coated bullets. But that's not the original understanding.

The right to procreate is not guaranteed, explicitly or implicitly, by the Constitution.

One evening at a hotel in New York I flipped around the television channels. Suddenly there on the public access channel was a voluptuous young woman, naked, her body oiled, writhing on the floor while fondling herself intimately ... I watched for some time
riveted by the sociological significance of it all.

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.

The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings.