Quotes About Constitution

Two Soviets . . . were talking to each other. And one of them asked, "What's the difference between the Soviet Constitution and the United States Constitution?" And the other one said, "That's easy. The Soviet Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of gathering. The American Constitution guarantees freedom after speech and freedom after gathering."

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our property and our liberty and our property under the Constitution.

Constitutions are violated, and it would be absurd to expect the federal government to enforce the Constitution against itself. If the very federal judges the Constitution was partly intended to restrain were the ones exclusively charged with enforcing it, then "America possesses only the effigy of a Constitution." The states, the very constituents of the Union, had to do the enforcing.

Within the constitution there is the word "referendum." You can change the constitution by referendum. But we have not yet called for a referendum. As of today, we have not yet organized any meeting or discussions on how to change the constitution.

It [the Constitution] didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that 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 it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn't shifted.

The commitment to international agreements is embodied, it's found in the U.S. Constitution. Article Six of the U.S. Constitution provides that treaties of the United States are part of the supreme law of the land along with the constitution itself and laws passed by Congress. Well, the US government certainly has not been acting in recent years as if treaties were part of the supreme law of the land.

The constitution regulates our stewardship; the constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to defense, to welfare, and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part, of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards, and must so discharge our trust as to secure in the highest attainable degree their happiness.

I believe in the Constitution. I believe in separation of powers. I believe in the rule of law. I believe in limited government. And these are principles and policies that apparently neither the national Republican nor the national Democrat Party believes in. I believe great damage is being done to our Constitution, and I see no remedy at all, no likelihood of that changing, if we rely on the two parties to field our candidates for national office.

The doctors will treat those of your citizens whose physical and psychological constitution is good: as for the others, they will leave the unhealthy to die and those whose psychological constitution is incurably warped they will be put to death.

Congress decides who becomes a citizen and how. To automatically say the 14th Amendment grants birthright citizenship, no, we can't change that. Amending the Constitution, not possible, takes too long. We gotta find another way of dealing with this. No, we don't, because it's not there. You don't have to amend the Constitution.

Free discussion is the only necessary Constitution - the only necessary Law of the Constitution.

Saying the Constitution is a living document is the same as saying we don't have a Constitution.

The Constitution limits the role of government. The Constitution enumerates the freedoms of the people and enforces those freedoms against government, making sure government cannot encroach.

The Constitution empowers the people to resolve our day's most contentious issues. When judges forget this basic truth, they do a disservice to our democracy and to our constitution.

This country was taken into war based on lies about weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda's role with respect to Iraq, which there wasn't one at the time we went in. I want to state that Mr. Cheney must be held accountable. He is already ginning up a cause for war against Iran. Now, we have to stand for this Constitution, we have to protect and defend this Constitution.

I do not know how Vladimir Putin will be esteemed by the future history, but I have no doubt that among his successes and advantages for Russia historians shall absolutely note the fact of his not altering the constitution, for he created a precedent. And afterwards, no matter who might become president, it shall be extremely difficult to alter the constitution exactly on that point. Extremely difficult.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.

Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution's focus upon the individual. ...To pursue the concept of racial entitlement - even for the most admirable and benign of purposes - is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.

The Constitution should contain a provision that every officer of the Government who should neglect or refuse to extend the protection guaranteed in the Constitution should be subject to capital punishment; and then the president of the United States would not say, "Your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you."

In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the general government. I have therefore undertaken on no occasion to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it; but have left them as the Constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of State or Church authorities acknowledged by the several religious societies.

If we set out with... a scrupulous regard to the Constitution, the government will acquire a spirit and a tone productive of permanent blessings to the community. If on the contrary,... the Constitution is slighted, or explained away, upon every frivolous pretext, the future of government will be feeble, distracted and arbitrary. The rights of the subjects will be the sport of every party vicissitude. There will be no settled rule of conduct, but everything will fluctuate with the alternate prevalency of contending factions.

In the constitution of Spain as proposed by the late Cortes, there was a principle entirely new to me:... that no person born after that day should ever acquire the rights of citizenship until he could read and write. It is impossible sufficiently to estimate the wisdom of this provision. Of all those which have been thought of for securing fidelity in the administration of the government, constant reliance to the principles of the constitution, and progressive amendments with the progressive advances of the human mind or changes in human affairs, it is the most effectual.

Upon the whole I doubt whether the Benefits of opposition to the Constitution opposition to the Constitution will not ultimately be productive of more good than evil; it has called forth, in its defence, abilities which would not perhaps have been otherwise exerted that have thrown a new light upon the science of government, It has given the rights of man a full and fair discussion, and explained them in so clear and forcible a manner, as cannot fail to make a lasting impression.

...[T]he Constitution conferred only a few specific powers on the federal government, all others being denied to it (as the Tenth Amendment would make plain). Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population today - subtle logicians like you - can grasp such nuances. Too bad. The Constitution wasn't meant to be a brain-twister.

This revision of the Constitution will not be perfect. But at least the Constitution will not be inflexible. It will be a step towards the Social Europe which we wish.

The power given by the Constitution to the Executive to interpose his veto is a high conservative power; but in my opinion it should never be exercised except in cases of clear violation of the Constitution, or manifest haste and want of due consideration by Congress.

No law can give Congress a backbone if it refuses to stand off as the coequal branch the Constitution made it.

All presidents swear an oath to the Constitution to keep this country united, and when the country fell apart, Lincoln had to put it back together again, with a lot of help. But he bore total responsibility.

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

Despite two decisions, in 2008 and 2010, by the U.S. Supreme Court unequivocally affirming that the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms against infringement by the government, state legislatures continue to do just that - enact laws that significantly infringe this fundamental human right.

If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.

I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity.

Government is necessary for our survival. We need government in order to survive. The Founding Fathers created a special place for government. It is called the Constitution.

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

The constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

For more than half a century... this Union has stood unshaken. Whatever dangers may threaten it, I shall stand by it and maintain it in its integrity to the full extent of the obligations imposed and the powers conferred upon me by the Constitution.

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it ... The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.

Now, how do you explain Obama's claim, that he can kill American citizens without due process? Well, he has his attorney general get up and say, "Well, it doesn't say in the constitution judicial process. It just says due process." Now that's a lawyerly diversion from the truth.

Conservative concepts believe in little government - take care of yourself, and that makes men who invent things like the constitution! Liberal thought has big government - we'll take care of you - and that creates boys and they create things like Occupy Wall Street! There's a difference between the way men and boys behave.

It doesn't say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state.

The United States Constitution is clear. It prohibits religious tests for public office.

Our Constitution recognises no other power than that of persuasion, for enforcing religious observances.

This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.

The Constitution: it's not just a good idea, it's the law.

Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.

I would not have suffered my name to have been used by my friends on anywise as President of the United States, or candidate for that office, if I and my friends could have had the privilege of enjoying our religious and civil rights as American citizens, even those rights which the Constitution guarantees unto all her citizens alike.

The Queen of England is Defender of the Faith but the President of the United States is Defender of the Constitution, which defends all faiths.

The first lesson, for all Canadians, is that the closed door, top down approaches to constitution making do not provide the public input or debate necessary to achieve a constitutional consensus that will be supported by the people.