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When they took the Fourth Amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the Sixth Amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the Second Amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the First Amendment, and I can't say anything at all.
Tim FreemanThere is this fashionable progressive notion that everything is so completely political that the idea we could have some sort of neutral legal process is practically utopian - because we all know that the more money you have, the more rights you can exercise in this society. But I don't think that you deal with income inequality by limiting the First Amendment rights of affluent people. I'd rather see people screw around with the tax code to redistribute wealth a little bit than screw around with the First Amendment.
Wendy KaminerWhatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago... The government should deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrasing Amendment.
George WillThe Scalia seat is defense. We're not going to get any better than Justice Scalia. The best we can do is preserve constitutional victories like upholding the Second Amendment, like protecting religious liberty. But we're not going to get any better.
Ted CruzThere are systemic, painful problems of globalization and de-industrialization that cannot be solved with a phone call or a tweet or an angry speech or trying to isolate the press and the first amendment. Sooner or later, the Donald Trump show, which is a projection of strength and authority, will have to deliver to his voters. And if he doesn't, in very real terms, if he can't supersede a situation where a president cut the unemployment rate in half, if he can't do better, if he can't open factories and all the rest that he's promised, then I think he's in trouble.
David RemnickEvolutionism is a religious world view that is not supported by science, Scripture, popular opinion, or common sense. The exclusive teaching of this dangerous, mind-altering philosophy in tax supported schools, parks, museums, etc. is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Kent HovindI believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office - and by personal conviction - I am sworn to uphold that tradition.
Lyndon B. JohnsonOutlawing religion form the political arena is not what the Founding Fathers intended when they drafted the First Amendment. We do a grave disservice to our country by removing the influence of religion. If you separate God from the public arena, inevitably you separate good from our government.
Bill BrightA constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.
Coretta Scott KingPeople for the American Way says it has yet to find anyone who has made a stronger case against the proposed school prayer Constitutional amendment... What kind of prayer would we use?
Cal Thomas[Liberals] are always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let's do it. Let's repress them. ... Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment.
Ann CoulterWhere's Barack Obama when Christmas references are being erased from civic calendars? Is he crying out in defense of religious liberty and our First Amendment? Nope. He's as silent as a church mouse. And animosity toward religion continues to grow.
Chuck NorrisWhen I think about what we need to do, we have 33,000 people a year who die from guns. I think we need comprehensive background checks, need to close the online loophole, close the gun show loophole. There's other matters that I think are sensible that are the kind of reforms that would make a difference that are not in any way conflicting with the Second Amendment.
Hillary ClintonLaws protecting the United States flag do not cut away at the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment... Congress made this position clear upon passage of the Flag Protection Act of 1989, which prohibited desecration of the flag.
Larry CraigIf the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.
Thurgood MarshallFor the Second Amendment to do its job, the other side must become much better informed. I watched an action-adventure program last night that asserted that the famous AK-47 - the original peoples' rifle (and Authority's greatest mistake) - is rare in this country, and that the only ones here were originally smuggled in from the Middle East, or possibly from South America. The idiots who wrote this mess seemed unaware that after legal imports - mostly from China - were illegally cut off by executive order, they began to be manufactured here.
L. Neil SmithThe First Amendment gives all of us - it gives it to me, it gives it to you, it gives all Americans - the right to speak our minds freely. It gives you the right and me the right to criticize fake news, and criticize it strongly.
Donald TrumpThere are many prices we pay for freedoms secured by the First Amendment; the risk of undue influence is one of them, confirming what we have long known: Freedom is hazardous, but some restraints are worse.
Warren E. BurgerTo the ACLU, the First Amendment speaks more directly to freedom from religion than it does to freedom of religion.
William Anthony DonohueThe Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was meant to inhibit only the federal government, not the states. The framers, as The Federalist Papers attest (see No. 28), saw the state militias as forces that might be summoned into action against the federal government itself, if it became tyrannical.
Joseph SobranFirst Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.
John YooFalse religions like Islam who teach that you must worship this way, are completely opposite with what our First Amendment stands for.
Roy MooreThe First Amendment was not intended to withdraw the Christian religion as a whole from the protection of Congress.
Joseph StoryI think basic disease care access and basic access to health care is a human right. If we need a constitutional amendment to put it in the Bill of Rights, then that's what we ought to do. Nobody with a conscience would leave the victim of a shark attack to bleed while we figure out whether or not they could pay for care. That tells us that at some level, health care access is a basic human right. Our system should be aligned so that our policies match our morality. Then within that system where everybody has access, we need to incentivize prevention, both for the patient and the provider.
David KatzThe Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend, one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.
William O. DouglasI'm not in the leftist controlled Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because of my political views, primarily my lifelong militant support of the NRA, the Second Amendment, and my belief that the only good bad guy is a dead bad guy.
Ted NugentThe real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less advance Mohammedanism, or Judaism or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but ... to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.
Joseph StoryWe are a people of faith. We have been so secure in that faith that we have enshrined in our Constitution protection for people who profess no faith. And good for us for doing so. That is what the First Amendment is all about.
William J. ClintonWhen did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted?
Antonin ScaliaIf the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.
Ilana MercerIt would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.
Jonathan Safran FoerThere was a conservative consensus for an amendment I put forward called Trust, But Verify that would have strengthened border security on both refugees, students and those coming here. And Marco sided and I guess was more sympathetic to Chuck Schumer and to the president than he was to conservative principles.
Rand PaulTo hold that Congress has general police power would be to hold that it may accomplish objects not intrusted to the general government, and to defeat the operation of the 10th Amendment, declaring that 'the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Melville FullerMarriage is not defined in the federal Constitution at all; it's a matter for the states. And applying the Fourteenth Amendment to the equality of men and women and their relationship in marriage is totally different than redefining marriage. Here is the overreach of the judiciary. This, if allowed to stand without any congressional approval, without any kind of enabling legislation, is what Jefferson warned us about. That's judicial tyranny.
Mike HuckabeeAny unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it's off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves.
Huey NewtonIf you don't uphold your legal responsibility to enforce the First Amendment, to provide speakers with platforms and audiences with safe, the ability to listen to speakers of all different kinds, agnostic ideology, if you don't do that as a university, you are not performing your essential function.
Milo YiannopoulosThis Government, the offspring of your own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support.
George WashingtonPrimaries are a family fight. I'm a pro-free enterprise, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life Republican.
Heather WilsonI think it's best if there's an amendment that goes on the ballot where the people can weigh in. Every time this issue has gone on the ballot, the people have voted to retain the traditional definition of marriage as recently as California in 2008.
Michele BachmannLoving the Second Amendment while opposing the NRA is every bit as natural as loving Jesus while opposing Westboro Baptist Church.
John FugelsangThe functionaries of public power rarely strengthen in their dispositions to abridge it, and an unorganized call for timely amendment is not likely to prevail against an organized opposition to it. We are always told that things are going on well; Why change them? 'Chi sta bene, no si mueve,' said the Italian, 'let him who stands well, stand still.' This is true; and I verily believe they would go on well with us under an absolute monarch, while our present character remains, of order, industry and love of peace, and restrained as he would be, by the proper spirit of the people.
Thomas JeffersonAs a young child, it became crystal clear to me that there were certain rights and privileges that other people had that my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great grandparents didn't have - that it was an ongoing struggle to realize the dream of the 14th and 15th Amendment.
John LewisBush proposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Some saw the move as an attempt to preserve traditional values, while others saw it as a cynical ploy to ensure that Vice President... Cheney will never have to pay for his gay daughter's wedding.
Jon Stewart