Quotes About Constitution

Our nation is built from the ground up to handle political disagreement. It is not built to endure mass-scale dishonesty and vindictiveness. No less a light than John Adams understood our nation's unique vulnerability to individual depravity. In his October 11, 1798, letter to the Massachusetts Militia, Adams famously wrote that "our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

When courts usurp the legislative function and make laws rather than interpret them, when Congress delegates its legislative functions to an unaccountable administrative state, and when presidents issue lawless executive orders, they are abusing their respective constitutional authority.

Elected federal officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. When they aren't held strictly to that oath, we have that anarchy we see metastasizing around us.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

I don't know if I've seen in the Constitution where it says if there's an election year, then we take a break until after for us to do the business of the American people.

The merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but checks it.

All legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional.

I fear to see the consequences of the Court's practices of substituting its own conceptions of decency and fundamental justice for the language of the Bill of Rights as its point of departure in interpreting and enforcing that Bill of Rights.... To hold that this Court can determine what, if any, provisions of the Bill of Rights will be enforced, and if so to what degree, is to frustrate the great design of a written Constitution.

It is part of the established tradition in the use of juries as instruments of public justice that the jury be a body truly representative of the community. For racial discrimination to result in the exclusion from Jury service of otherwise qualified groups not only violates our Constitution and the laws enacted under it, but is at war with our basic concepts of a democratic society and a representative government.

The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.

Our constitution shows one thing pretty clearly. While the Founders wanted a stable government, they were also afraid of it.

India, which became independent along with Pakistan in 1947, agreed on a constitution in 1949 and held its first general election in 1951. Pakistan's first constitution was not promulgated until 1956, and within two years it was abrogated through a military coup d'état.

The Jamaat-e-Islami played a key role in mobilizing theologians to favor an Islamic constitution. It maintained a hard-line posture against India and helped the state by describing leftists, secularists, and ethnic nationalists as "anti-Islam unbelievers.

But in the final analysis it doesn't matter whether they were Christian believers, Deists, or atheists: Their intention was to create a system of governance that prohibited the privileging of one set of beliefs over another and allowed citizens the freedom to choose and practice religion without the interference of the state.

The Constitution, as originally drawn, made no reference to the fact that all Americans wre considered equal members of society.

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102)

That's why I believe in a Constitution which separates church from state. I've seen what happens when they get in cahoots.

The ultimate lesson to prohibition is two-fold. Watch out for solutions that end up worse than the problems they set out to solve, and remember the Constitution is no place for experiments, noble or otherwise." – D. Duane Steward, PhD

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers.

The constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. This is the very essence of judicial duty.

Although Britain has, since 1653, had nothing approaching a single, codified constitution, it did for a very long time possess a broad cult of constitutional writing. The Petition of Right of 1628, like the Bill of Rights of 1689, was a cherished text. So, most of all, was Magna Carta.

If Trump wants to corruptly direct the conduct of an investigation in order to out an FBI source who was helping our government investigate Russian interference in our electoral processes, well, Article II of the Constitution begins with these terrifying words: 'The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.'

My ascension as interim president is based on Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution, according to which, if at the outset of a new term there is no elected head of state, power is vested in the president of the National Assembly until free and transparent elections take place.

As a country we have more of a political constitution than a legal one, and as such it operates via conventions and precedents.