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Constitution Quotes

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Constitution Quotes

“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.”

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Book:Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, Before the Adoption of the Constitution
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“The principle of allegiance to the Constitution is basic to our freedom....when you see government invading any of these realms of freedom which we have under our Constitution, you will know that they are putting shackles on your liberty, and that tyranny is creeping upon you, ...no matter what the reason and excuse therefore may be.”

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Author:J. Reuben Clark
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“There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.”

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Author:Mitt Romney
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“The first right of every human being is the right of self-defense. Without that right, all other rights are meaningless. The right of self-defense is not something the government bestows upon its citizens. It is an inalienable right, older than the Constitution itself. It existed prior to government and prior to the social contract of our Constitution.”

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Author:Larry Craig
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“Until the 1930s, the Constitution served as a major constraint on federal economic interventionism. The government's powers were understood to be just as the framers intended: few and explicitly enumerated in our founding document and its amendments. Search the Constitution as long as you like, and you will find no specific authority conveyed for the government to spend money on global-warming research, urban mass transit, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, or countless other items in the stimulus package and, even without it, in the regular federal budget.”

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Author:Robert Higgs
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“In explaining the Constitution, James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper 45: 'The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peach, negotiation, and foreign commerce.' Has the Constitution been amended to permit Congress to tax, spend and regulate as it pleases or have Americans said, 'To hell with the Constitution'?”

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Author:Walter E. Williams
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“The Constitution contains no 'dignity' Clause, and even if it did, the government would be incapable of bestowing dignity. ... Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits.”

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Author:Clarence Thomas
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“If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

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Author:Antonin Scalia
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“...compartmentalization of occupations and interests bring about a separation of that mode of activity commonly called 'practice' from insight; of imagination from executive 'doing.' Each of these activities is then assigned its own place in which it must abide. Those who write the anatomy of experience then suppose that these divisions inhere in the very constitution of human nature.”

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Author:John Dewey
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“The Constitution has to be interpreted loosely, otherwise it becomes a straitjacket. You can't interpret it literally. You can pretend to, and go digging around in 18th Century dictionaries to figure out what 'cruel and unusual punishment' meant or what the 'right to bear arms' meant, but that is all fake really. The Constitution has to be interpreted in light of modern needs, and that's what they (the strict interpreters) end up doing in spite of all their investigations.”

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Author:Richard Posner
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“There is absolutely nothing in the Mormon's religion inconsistent with the most patriotic devotion to the government of the United States. Revelation and the commandments of the church require that the Constitution and the laws of the land be upheld. It is also part of our belief that the time will come when the country will be distracted and general lawlessness prevail. Then the Mormon people will step forward and take an active part in rescuing the nation from ruin.”

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Author:Wilford Woodruff
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“The Court's decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people's decision to give Congress '[a]ll legislative Powers' enumerated in the Constitution. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them.”

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Author:Antonin Scalia
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“Does the U.S. Constitution stand for anything in an era of government excess? Can that founding document, which is supposed to restrain the power and reach of a centralized federal government, slow down the juggernaut of czars, health insurance overhaul and anything else this administration and Congress wish to do that is not in the Constitution?”

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Author:Cal Thomas
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