Life & Mortality Quote by Antonin Scalia

Scalia doesn’t just reject the “living Constitution” here; he flips its branding into a dare. The line is structured like a street-corner challenge: you want X, then earn it the hard way. The repetition of “Persuade your fellow citizens” is the real thesis, turning constitutional interpretation into a test of democratic muscle rather than judicial creativity. In Scalia’s hands, “flexibility” isn’t courts adapting old text to new life; it’s politics absorbing conflict in public, with winners accountable to voters and legislatures, not to chambers of robed mandarins.

The subtext is a warning about power. When Scalia talks about abortion and the death penalty in the same breath, he’s not equating their morality so much as their constitutional status: both are flashpoints that, he argues, should be settled by persuasion and statute, not discovered as rights or prohibitions through interpretive drift. That pairing is deliberate bait, forcing listeners on either side to confront an uncomfortable implication: if you love judicial protection when your side wins, you’re endorsing the same mechanism that can entrench what you hate when the Court flips.

Context matters: this is Scalia at peak anti-activist rhetoric, defending originalism as a democratic ethic. The bite comes from his cynicism about “flexibility” talk, which he treats as a euphemism for elite discretion. It works because it recasts constitutional debate as a legitimacy fight: who gets to decide, and by what right, when the country is split.