"The more I reflected on what was happening, the more it astonished me. As a child of the Deep South, I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia, but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony. For all the fear I'd known as a boy in Savannah, this was the first time I'd found myself at the mercy of people who would do whatever they could to hurt me - and institutions that had once prided themselves on bring segregation and its abuses to an end were aiding and abetting in the assault. Hypersensitive civil rights leaders who saw racism around every corner fell silent when my liberal enemies sneered that I was unqualfied to sit on the Court; editors and reporters who claimed to be objective substituted a pretense of balance for true fariness, presenting outrageous, wholly unsupported allegation side by side with spluttering denials. The implausible was now being treated more favorably than the obvious."
- Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, conservative Republican, in his memoir My Grandfather's Son
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