Quotes About Constitution

According to the legal historian Akhil Reed Amar, before the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, "the Supreme Court never—not once—referred to the 1792 decalogue as 'the' or 'a' bill of rights.

Adams began his reply with a devastating comment on the preamble to the Constitution: "I confess," he said, "as I enter the Building I stumble at the Threshold. I meet with a National Government, instead of a federal Union of Sovereign States.

Under the state constitutions, "every thing which is not reserved is given," but under the federal Constitution "every thing which is not given, is reserved.

Europe is difficult to coordinate, and our main deficit may not even lie in this area of finance and economics, but in foreign and security policy. We have a leadership problem because we are still 27 different members who have still not decided on how to work with each other based on what we used to call a European constitution.

I'm a little skeptical about using the Constitution this way, but I also believe marriage is between a man and a woman and that the courts shouldn't legislate this matter.

I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution.

In his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: Words That Remade America, Garry Wills (2006) argues that it was Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address who transformed America's individualism-oriented Constitution, with all its checks and balances, into a vision of the common good. Lincoln is the de facto godfather of the common good.

I really think the Patriot Act violates our Constitution. It was, it is, an illegal act. The Congress, the Senate and the president cannot change the Constitution.

In this reality, she would doubtless tell you she must respect the local constitution, or some nonsense justification.

Freud never questioned the powerful participation of objective realities in the very constitution of human experience. Love, as he put it late in life, seeks objects. So does hatred. And those objects are external, not internal, agents of experience.

The US constitution is like Washington DC, a matter of columns and beautiful design, the English constitution is more like a forest, you can't build a forest, you can easily cut it down, and that is what we're doing, we're cutting down a forest that we can't rebuild.