Quotes About Constitutions

Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They're organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations. I, however, have limitations. In my desire to provide an ultimate protection for my people, I forbid a constitution.

Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.

The British Government very naturally would like to see in India the form of democratic constitutions it knows best and thinks best, under which the Government of the country is entrusted to one or other political party in accordance with the turn of elections.

The fundamentally important issue in the design of constitutions is to enable rather than hinder economic transitions that are not well understood in advance.

The two constitutions—one for expansion, the other for containment—form the two sides of inverted totalitarianism.

You must purge yourself before finding faults in others. When you see a mistake in somebody else, try to find if you are making the same mistake. This is the way to take judgement and turn it into improvement. Do not look at others' bodies with envy or with superiority. All people are born with different constitutions. Never compare with others. Each one's capacities are a function of his or her internal strength. Know your capacities and continually improve upon them.

No man can by care taking (as the Scripture saith) add a cubit to his stature, in this little model of a man's body; but in the great frame of kingdoms and commonwealths, it is in the power of princes or estates, to add amplitude and greatness to their kingdoms; for by introducing such ordinances, constitutions, and customs, as we have now touched, they may sow greatness to their posterity and succession. But these things are commonly not observed, but left to take their chance.

No hay buena fe en América, ya sea entre los hombres o entre las naciones —se lamentaba cierta vez Bolívar—. Los tratados son papeles, las Constituciones libros, las elecciones batallas, la libertad anarquía y la vida un tormento. Lo único que se puede hacer en América es emigrar.

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government.

The Americans' new state constitutions would therefore have to be fixed plans—single written documents, as the English constitution had never been—outlining the powers of government and specifying the rights of citizens.

Of course genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes.

In 1977 Justice William Brennan wrote a famous article, published in the Harvard Law Review, that encouraged the use of state constitutions to protect constitutional rights.52 State constitutions, he argued, "are a font of individual liberties.

States can provide more protection of rights under their constitutions than exists under the U.S. Constitution. To take a simple example, the Supreme Court has held that citizens have no First Amendment right to use privately owned shopping centers for speech purposes.57 But the California Supreme Court interpreted the state constitution to create a right in the state to use shopping centers for expression. The Supreme Court upheld this interpretation as permissible.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.

The world is littered with constitutions that have written guarantees of rights but that don't actually deliver rights. What differentiates the ones where rights are real from where rights are fake is that it's in the initial interests of the majority to actually deliver these rights.

The constitutions of Maryland and New York are founded in higher wisdom.

The Emancipation Proclamation is predicated upon the idea that the President may so annul the constitutions and laws of sovereign states, overthrow their domestic relations, deprive loyal men of their property, and disloyal as well, without trial or condemnation.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions...but I know also that laws and constitutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.....

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

The constitutions of Maryland and New York are founded in higher wisdom.

en Latinoamérica las constituciones se utilizan como instrumentos para subvertir el propio imperio de la ley

Dworkin, for example, argues that our law includes not only norms found in treaties, customs, constitutions, statutes, and cases, but also moral principles that provide the best justification for the norms found there.5 On his account the things justified by moral