Created Equal Quotes

“If you criticize a black person who’s more liberal, you are racist. Whereas you can do whatever to me… and that’s fine because you’re not really black, because you’re not doing what we expect black people to do. That’s just the way it is.”
― Michael Pack, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

“I think we’ve pushed free will aside, and we’ve pushed aside people’s right to fail… You can’t assure people that they’re going to be successful. You can give people security, but it comes at the expense of liberty.”
― Michael Pack, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

“The Constitution guarantees liberty. Now liberty gives you the liberty to succeed, liberty to fail, liberty to be mediocre, liberty to be outstanding. It doesn’t guarantee either, but it does guarantee your right that the government isn’t going to tell you what to do every day.”
― Michael Pack, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

“If we keep it up, we’re going to look around and someone will say, ‘I want my constitutional rights,’ and they’ll be told, ‘We have no Constitution.’ I think we have to be really, really careful…
We’re running the risk of one day not having a Constitution, and hence not having a country. We’re going to pay a price. People forget what happened to the great empires of the world: the Ottoman Empire, gone, fragmented; the Habsburg Empire; the Roman Empire. And the one thing that we have is this long-lasting written constitution, that should be, for us, like the Holy Grail: to be protected. Our desires don’t amend the Constitution, that’s the touchstone for everything. It allows us to live in a free society, but it doesn’t guarantee us the best position in that free society.”
― Michael Pack, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

“The women in the movie Hidden Figures were more like the people around me. You always had those people, exceptional people, around, people who were just brilliant, and they were black. Suddenly they turned us all into helpless victims. I don’t think creating that attitude is good, that sense of a permanent victim status, like we’re serfs or something. I don’t think it’s good now, and I think it’s counterfactual and ahistorical.”
― Michael Pack, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

“I’ve lived through segregation. Now, it’s diversity. I think people should be asked to show what it has produced. We have done some damage in our society, particularly to the people who could least afford the damage… They shut down schools in the name of integration… They irreparably changed the black teaching profession, and these policies irreparably changed our communities.”
― Michael Pack, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

“My grandparents, when they took us in in 1955, what they did was supply hope… And people think it’s just education, it’s just food. It was more than that, and they understood that. They understood that you needed the things of life-- work ethic, self-discipline, a set of morals, to get through life. And they supplied them… These were poor black people in the Deep South, but they had figured out the essentials of life. It was their victory. They had won. They had been proven right.”
― Michael Pack, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words