We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
 Constitution Quotes 
"History is clear that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted to secure certain common law rights of the people, against invasion by the Federal Government."
 
 
~ Bell v. Hood, 
     
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States"
 
 
~ Presidential Oath of Office 
  
"To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples."
 
 
~ U.N. Charter,
   
"Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty."
 
 
 
 
 
 

~ John Adams
   
“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
 
 
~ John Adams    
 
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble opinion, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
 
 
 
 
~ John Adams
    
"The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

~ Samuel Adams
"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

~ Samuel Adams 
   
"We all want 'justice.' But justice requires preserving the rule of law, most particularly the integrity of the Constitution."
 
~ Doug Bandow   
 
"An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment."
 
 
~ Hugo L. Black   
 
"Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind."
 
 
~ Hugo L. Black
   
"The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers' document; it is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of
the age."
 
 

~ Nadia Boulanger
"The makers of our Constitution conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone--the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."
 
 
~ Louis D. Brandeis 
   
“All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance -- unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment].”
 
 
 

~ William J. Brennan   
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It's just a goddamned piece of paper."
 
~ George W. Bush
  
"The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity."
 


~  Henry Clay
“To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.”
 
~ Calvin Coolidge 
   
"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."

~ William Orville Douglas
"The strength of the Constitution, lies in the will of the people to defend it."
 
~ Thomas Edison 

“Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.”
 

~ Harry Emerson Fosdick
"Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws, not of men."
 
~ Gerald R. Ford
   
"Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
 
 

~ Benjamin Franklin
"The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive."
 

~ Edward Gibbon
"As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from the womb and long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."
 
 
 

~ W. E. Gladstone 

"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."
 
 

~ Alexander Hamilton
“If it be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws - the first growing out of the last. . . . A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government.”
 
 
 
 
 

~ Alexander Hamilton 
   
"A treaty cannot be made which alters the Constitution of the country, or which infringes and express exceptions to the power of the Constitution."
 
 
~ Alexander Hamilton

"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."
 
 
 
~ Patrick Henry 

"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom or the thought that we hate."
 
 
 
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
"From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one - absolutely no one - is above the law."
 
 
 
~ Leon Jaworski
"In matters of Power, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
 
 
~ Thomas Jefferson
   
"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed and that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of press."
 
 
 
 

~  Thomas Jefferson
   
"On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
 
 
 
 
~ Thomas Jefferson
   
"It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention."
 
 
 ~  Lyndon B. Johnson
   
“[The Constitution is] the most liberating, wonderful document that human beings could ever have possibly written, next to the Ten Commandments.”
 
 
~ Rick Kaplan
   
“One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

~ Dr. Martin Luther King
   
"The Constitution does not grant rights, it recognizes them."

 ~ Jason Laumark
"Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."
 
 
~ James Madison
   
"Whatever may be the judgment pronounced on the competency of the architects of the Constitution, or whatever may be the destiny of the edifice prepared by them, I feel it a duty to express my profound and solemn conviction, driven from my intimate opportunity of observing and appreciating the views of the Convention, collectively and individually, that there never was an assembly of men charged with a great and arduous trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them, than were the members of the Federal Convention of 1787."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

~ James Madison
    
"If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch."
 
 
~ Thurgood Marshall
   
“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country. We refuse to recognize a claim to power that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
~  Diana Gribbon Motz
   
"It's the Constitution, Stupid." ~ M. Nadarajan
   
"It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself."
 
 
~ Sandra Day O'Conner
  
"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."
 
 
 
 
~ Edmund A. Opitz 
"The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax."
 
 
~ Thomas Paine
"A constitution is not a thing in name only, but in fact. It has not an ideal but a real existence, and wherever it cannot be produced in a visible form, there is none. A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of a people constituting a government. It is the body of elements to which you refer, and quote article by article, and contains the principles on which the government shall be established--the form in which it shall be organized--the powers it shall have--the mode of elections--the duration of Congress--and, in fine, everything that relates to the complete organization of a civil government, and the principles on which it shall act, and by which it shall be bound. A constitution is to a government, therefore, what the laws made by that government are to a court of judicature. The court of judicature does not make laws, neither can it alter them; it only acts in conformity to the laws made; and the government is in like manner governed by the constitution."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


~ Thomas Paine 
"The government was set to protect man from criminals -- and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government -- as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power."
 
 
 
 
~ Ayn Rand 

"A judge should be, when it's necessary, that lone patriot standing out protecting the Constitution."
 
~ Ronald Reagan
   
"The United States Constitution has proven itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written."
 
 
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
   
"Don't begin to think you're the President. You're not. The Constitution provides for only one."
 

~ Donald Rumsfeld
   
"I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation."
 
 

~ Dr. Carl Sagan
"If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility."
 
 
 
 

~  Antonin Scalia
”The U.S. Constitution has endured for more than two centuries as the embodiment of the idea of representative democracy and the brilliant concept that all governmental power ultimately derives from We the People.”
 
 
-
~ Dr. Raymond Smock
   
“There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution.”
 
~ Judge Anna Diggs Taylor
"No power on earth is greater than a mind and soul reawakened. Our Constitution begins 'we the people', not 'us the government'. "
 
 ~ Cal Thomas

"When the Constitution gave us the right to bear arms, it also made us responsible for using them properly. It's not fair of us as citizens to lean more heavily on one side of that equation than on the other."
 
 

~ Jesse Ventura

"The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon."
  ~ George Washington
   
"If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates, but let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."
 
 
 
 
 

~ George Washington
   
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
 
 
 
 
 

~  Daniel Webster 
 
"Let this circumstance of our constitution therefore be directed to this noble purpose, and then all the objections urged against it by jealous tyranny and affrighted superstition will vanish."
 
 
~ Adam  Weishaupt

"In the Constitution of the American Republic there was a deliberate and very extensive and emphatic division of governmental power for the very purpose of preventing unbridled majority rule."
 
 
 
~ Robert Welch

"The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens."
 
~ Wendell Willkie 
 
”Too many people expect wonders from democracy, when the most wonderful thing of all is just having it.”
 
~ Walter Winchell
"The Constitution is both color blind and color conscious. To avoid conflict with the equal protection clause, a classification that denies a benefit, causes harm, or imposes a burden must not be based on race. In that sense the Constitution is color blind."

 
 
 
 
 
~ John Minor Wisdom
 

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“I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the Constitution to a man who will burn the Constitution and then wrap himself in the flag” -- Craig Washington