Quotes About Constitution

When parties and elections are financed not by public funds but by private contributions, the political forum is so constrained by the wishes of the dominant interests that the basic measures needed to establish just constitutional rule are seldom properly presented.

To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.

My answer to the racial problem in America is to not deal with it at all. The founding fathers dealt with it when they made the Constitution.

No religious doctrine shall be established by law.

A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it.

Those who enjoy the blessings of liberty under a divinely inspired constitution should promote morality, and they should practice what the Founding Fathers called civic virtue.

I have never seen such extreme partisanship, such bitter partisanship, and such forgetfulness of the fate of our fathers and of the Constitution.

It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.

Do we fear terrorism so much that we throw out our Constitution, and are we unwilling and afraid to debate our Constitution?

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

I will endorse the Supreme Court's unfairly maligned opinion in Employment Div. v. Smith, and I will argue that there is no constitutional right to harm others simply because the conduct is religiously motivated. The Court's First Amendment doctrine is wise. Legislatures can exempt the religious from some laws, but only where legislators and prosecutors ask the hard questions and where the religious entities have borne the burden of proving that exempting them renders significant harm.

Americans chose a limited government that exists to protect our rights, not to grant them.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.

To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.

The framers of our Constitution meant we were to have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.

The Constitution is the sole source and guaranty of national freedom.

The Constitution provides for freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

Our plans protect freedom and opportunity, and our blueprint is the Constitution of the United States.

The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that.

For the past two centuries, those who do not prize freedom have chipped away at every major clause of our Constitution until today we face a crisis of great dimensions.

Freedom to publish means freedom for all and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the constitution but freedom to continue to prevent others from publishing is not.