Quotes About Constitution

Either somebody has equal rights, or they don't. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There's no mention of a man and a woman.

The Constitution did not mention women when it was first written, and it still doesn't.

The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu.

As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers.

Egypt had the first constitution in the Middle East that allowed for liberty. And it had democracy.

No migrant of any religion has a constitutional right to come to the United States.

Under our Constitution, military leaders have no choice but to endorse the president's decision after giving him their best advice.

The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.

The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint, upon the advice and consent of a majority of the Senate, and it plainly does not give a minority of senators any right to interfere with that process.

And those rights are not to be lightly infringed upon by government in any way. They're explicitly protected by the Constitution from the government. We are, after all, fragile living things that can be suppressed and abused by the powerful.

The Constitution doesn't give us rights: it restrains government from infringing on rights we acquire at birth by virtue of being human beings, "natural rights" that are held by "natural persons." The Constitution holds back (restraining government) rather than gives forward (granting rights to people).

T here's no written rule anywhere that I know of stating this, no First-teenth Amendment to the Literary Constitution, but there might as well be: you get one national poet.

As fine a document as the Constitution is, the Antifederalists, who were not frivolous men, raised some prescient criticisms. Patrick Henry was concerned that the "general welfare" clause would someday be interpreted to authorize practically any federal power that might be imagined.

The main point that nullification addresses is that a government allowed to determine the scope of its own powers cannot remain limited for long.

T]he constitution of man's nature is of itself subject to desire novelty.

Tocqueville was correct in his rendition of how the Constitution was formed, but he likely never dreamed that an American president would ever send an invading army to kill some 300,000 of his own citizens in order to destroy the right of secession, a right that all of America's founding fathers held as sacrosanct and that was at the very heart of the American system of government.

Woodrow Wilson would write approvingly in his 1908 book, Constitutional Government in the United States, that "the War between the States established… this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers." 26 This was the Jeffersonians' greatest fear. Thanks to Lincoln's war, states' rights would no longer perform its most important function: protecting the citizens of the states from federal judicial tyranny.

The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.

In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.

On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

The constitution of most of the states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed and that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press.

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms

Nothing is more likely than that [the] enumeration of powers is defective. This is the ordinary case of all human works. Let us then go on perfecting it by adding by way of amendment to the Constitution those powers which time and trial show are still wanting

On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct.