Top 43 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Bork

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

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.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept.

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.

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

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.

In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.

If the children already born each have only two children themselves ... in twenty-seven to thirty-five years the population of the world will double.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept

If conservatives come to control the White House and both Houses of Congress, there will be very little change in Hollywood, the network evening news, universities, church bureaucracies, the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Institutions that are overwhelmingly left-liberal will continue to misinform the public and distort public discourse.

The judge's authority derives entirely from the fact that he is applying the law and not his personal values. That is why the American public accepts the decisions of its courts, accepts even decisions that nullify the laws a majority of the electorate or their representatives voted for.

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

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.

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.

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

Our country is being radically altered, step by step, by Justices who are not following any law.

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.

[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.

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.

The First Amendment is about how we govern ourselves - not about how we titillate ourselves sexually.

No church that panders to the zeitgeist deserves respect, and very shortly it will not get respect, except from those who find it politically useful, and that is less respect than disguised contempt.

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.

Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the Sixties. This is a revolutionary, not a reformist, movement, and it is meeting with considerable success. Totalitarian in spirit, it is deeply antagonistic to traditional Western culture and proposes the complete restructuring of society, morality, and human nature.

There is no single grand strategy. Just as the New Left abandoned an overarching program and became a series of like-minded groups advancing area by area, so it must counterattacked area by area.

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.

The Federalist Society has done more for the health of the law than any organization I have witnessed in my career.

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

One man's larceny is another's just distribution of goods.

Under the First Amendment's prohibition of the establishment of religion, the Court has steadily made religion a matter for the private individual by driving it out of the public arena.