Quotes About Constitution

generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. [It] says what the states can't do to you. [It] says what the federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.

His concern was that if there were a few rights specified in the Constitution, future generations may forget that those are just examples and that the Constitution itself protects all human rights.

Man is without Duty round him; except it be "to make the Constitution." He is without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world.

And although it is true that the calamities of my noviciate in London had struck root so deeply in my bodily constitution, that afterwards they shot up and flourished afresh, and grew into a noxious umbrage that has overshadowed and darkened my latter years, yet these second assaults of suffering were met with a fortitude more confirmed, with the resources of a maturer intellect, and with alleviations from sympathising affection—how deep and tender!

Our Second Amendment rights are not up for negotiation.

The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.

I will never forget that it is the people who speak directly through the constitution they have adopted.

I will never forget January 22, 1973, the day seven members of our highest court ripped up the Constitution.

In 2005 in Iraq, the constitution was written. A new government was elected. That government was trying to take office in 2006.

There was a good Constitution in America, and he had read it carefully. It gave liberty, but he recognized that it worked only for people in skins whose color ran from pink to tan. People with darker skins might as well have fur or feathers.

When Rob J. had prepared for citizenship he'd studied the United States Constitution and marveled at its provisions. Now he saw that the genius of those who had written the Constitution was that it foresaw man's weakness of character and the continuing presence of evil in the world, and sought to make individual freedom the legal reality to which the country had to return again and again.

Ahora se daba cuenta de que el genio de aquellos que habían redactado la Constitución consistía en prevenir la debilidad de carácter del hombre y la presencia constante del mal en el mundo y convertir la libertad individual en la realidad legal a la que el país tenía que volver una y otra vez.

When the NSA's surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden's revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.

In the U.S. Constitution there was a category of creatures called three-fifth humans—the enslaved population. They weren't considered persons. And in fact women were barely considered persons, so they didn't have rights.

A major question was to what extent should we permit real democracy? Madison discussed this pretty seriously, not so much in the Federalist Papers—which were kind of propaganda—but in the debates of the Constitutional Convention, which are the most interesting place to look. If you read the debates, Madison said the major concern of the society—any decent society—has to be to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." His phrase.

The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it's like Pet Sounds. The wide-scale adoption of political correctness was silly, but not unreasonable. The freedom that was lost was mostly theoretical and rarely necessary. No one is significantly worse off.

The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it's like Pet Sounds.

The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it's like Pet Sounds. The

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . is the definition of tyranny. —James Madison

Lincoln replied:There is a difference between secession against the Constitution and in favor of the Constitution.

It began in 1784, when people in the western territories of North Carolina (now eastern Tennessee) became disgusted with Tidewater control. Their solution was pure Borderlander: they created their own sovereign State of Franklin on nobody's permission but their own. They drafted a constitution that prohibited lawyers, clergy, and doctors from running for office, set up a government in the village of Greeneville, and passed laws making apple brandy, animal skins, and tobacco legal tender.

Stay on the path and you'll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn't help one another we'd be lost out there.

Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.

Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box -- complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.