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The men who wrote the First Amendment religion clause did not view paid legislative chaplains and opening prayers as a violation of that amendment... the practice of opening sessions with prayer has continued without interruption ever since that early session of Congress. It can hardly be thought that in the same week the members of the first Congress voted to appoint and pay a chaplain for each House and also voted to approve the draft of the First Amendment... (that) they intended to forbid what they had just declared acceptable.
Warren E. BurgerI was lecturing at the Columbia Journalism School of Education. I asked them about what was happening to the Fourth Amendment. I said, "By the way, do you know what is in the Fourth Amendment?" One student responded, "Is that the right to bear arms?" It's hard to believe these are bright students.
Nat HentoffThen President [Barack] Obama went on to argue that a citizen`s Second Amendment rights can be restricted without being infringed, just like any other rights. There are limits on your free speech and on your right to privacy. But he also made another nuanced Constitutional argument, that the rights enshrined in the Second Amendment must be balanced alongside the others rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Melissa Harris-PerryI think that for most of our history, there was a nuanced reading of the Second Amendment until the decision by the late Justice [Antoine] Scalia and there was no argument until then that localities and states and the federal government had a right, as we do with every amendment, to impose reasonable regulation.
Hillary ClintonThe 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 RemnickIt's time ... the Republican Party end the war on women they started. Whether it's the Blunt-Rubio amendment, personhood or attempts to repeal Roe v. Wade, we aren't going to let extremist politicians dictate to women what we can or cannot do with our bodies.
Debbie Wasserman SchultzSome 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.
Thomas JeffersonThus if the First Amendment means anything in this field, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community. In other words, literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
William O. DouglasWe are going to have a long period where people are accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment.
Nat HentoffThe National Guard fulfills the militia mentioned in the Second amendment. Citizens no longer need to protect the states or themselves.
Dianne FeinsteinIf America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
Henry Louis GatesThe word 'free' is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with 'freedom.' The word 'fair' is not used in either of our founding documents.
Milton FriedmanMy own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue.
C. S. LewisThe Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
Alex KozinskiSo the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
Neil GaimanOur 1 million members across the country will be watching closely to see if the video game industry hides behind a First Amendment veil in order to exploit children for the sake of corporate profit.
Connie SelleccaFor 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 SmithThere's as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.
Morris SheppardSo the Lincoln movie gets trashed because Connecticut voted for the amendment - not to mention how the people in Connecticut feel - but there's a lot of that. And I think it precedes from a fundamental misunderstanding of cinema. They are entertainment. And I'd like to say that entertainment isn't a synonym for disposable or mindless or stupid. Hamlet? Pretty entertaining from where I come from.
Nicholas MeyerI say that the Second Amendment doesn't allow for exceptions - or else it would have read that the right "to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, unless Congress chooses otherwise." And because there are no exceptions, I disagree with my fellow panelists who say the existing gun laws should be enforced. Those laws are unconstitutional [and] wrong - because they put you at a disadvantage to armed criminals, to whom the laws are no inconvenience.
Harry BrowneI think the president, very simply, has never read a copy of the Constitution. I think that that's true. He's just never bothered to read the Constitution, and he just has no understanding and appreciation of the First Amendment's protections for freedom of speech.
John KiriakouJohn Marshall's warning that the power to tax is the power to destroy has taken on far greater meaning... more specifically, the power of the Internal Revenue Service is threatening to destroy the freedom of religion , guaranteed by the First Amendment. As part of that guarantee, Congress has granted tax exemptions for churches to avoid excessive interference in their religious activities.
Chuck GrassleyDonald Trump and the First Amendment - it's not a beautiful match. It's not a match made in heaven, you know, between the free speech rights that he has not defended and the freedom of the press which he has not defended. It's problematic.
Megyn KellyLately the First Amendment has been interpreted to deny equal protection of the law to those who believe in God. The Constitution established freedom for religion, not freedom from religion!
Jack KempAnd I took a walk and I just went to prayer and I said Lord, what would you have me do in the Minnesota state senate? And just through prayer I knew that I was to introduce the marriage amendment in Minnesota.
Michele BachmannIt appears that some school officials, teachers, and parents have assumed that religious expression of any type is either inappropriate or forbidden altogether in public schools; however, nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones.
William J. ClintonThe First Amendment doesn't give anybody the right to be heard. People don't have to listen to you.
Rush LimbaughI'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 NugentTo 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 FullerThe First Amendment...begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.
George WillI can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.
E. B. WhiteI believe the equal rights amendment is a necessity of life for all citizens. The cabinet sometimes felt that I shouldn't be so outspoken.
Betty FordWhen you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment, taking the Fifth so they're not prosecuted, when you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth, I think it's disgraceful. And believe me, this country thinks it's - really thinks it's disgraceful, also.
Donald TrumpThe Democrats in the Senate adopted a resolution, an amendment, saying that there should be no Guantanamo detainees brought into this country. So, more and more, we're finding the American people on one side, the ACLU and the troglodytes from the New York Times on the other, where they belong.
Peter KingThe spirit of the First Amendment has been effectively repealed for conservative speech by a censorious, accusatory mob.
Ann CoulterPrimaries are a family fight. I'm a pro-free enterprise, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life Republican.
Heather WilsonThe nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another.
Ilana MercerThe Eighth Amendment to the Constitution protects citizens against cruel and unusual punishment. And there is a growing body of legal precedent that shows that transgender people who are incarcerated should be provided with these medically necessary procedures. In cases where they're not, it is considered a violation of those rights.
Allyson RobinsonThe First Amendment is important not only to guarantee the rights of alternative religions and of nonreligious persons in society; it is also important in setting the only possible legal and social condition for the creative health of serious religion itself.
Langdon Brown GilkeyThe lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.
Anthony KennedyThe Second Amendment was designed explicitly to protect weapons that would be useful in a military context.
Ted Cruz