Amendment Quotes

1. "Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.[Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, 1968.]"
Author: Abe Fortas

2. "It is the will of the American people that we have a right to protect our flag and this can only be accomplished by passing a Constitutional amendment."
Author: Adrian Cronauer

3. "Asking questions is an essential part of police investigation. In the ordinary sense a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment."
Author: Anthony Kennedy

4. "First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."[Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (00-795), 198 F.3d 1083, affirmed.]"
Author: Anthony M. Kennedy

5. "You call for a constitutional amendment banning abortion? We call for federally-funded, partial-birth abortions at the drive-through at McDonald's."
Author: Bill Maher

6. "Failure is not an end-point, but amendment to suit your success"
Author: Binye Vincent

7. "The DISCLOSE Act is a testament to the wisdom of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United. The First Amendment sought to place political speech beyond the government's control, and we can be glad that it did."
Author: Bradley A. Smith

8. "The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend."
Author: Byron White

9. "As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race."
Author: Cass Sunstein

10. "The tenth amendment said the federal government is supposed to only have powers that were explicitly given in the Constitution. I think the federal government's gone way beyond that. The Constitution never said that you could have a Federal Reserve that would have $2.8 trillion in assets. We've gotten out of control."
Author: David Malpass

11. "First off, I never favored a constitutional amendment to criminalize abortion or to overturn Roe v. Wade."
Author: Dennis Kucinich

12. "Specifically, the reservation of sovereignty to the people of the states in matters not governed by federal law is constitutionally defined and permanently enshrined in the 10th Amendment."
Author: Dick Thornburgh

13. "I oppose a constitutional amendment against gay marriage."
Author: Ed Case

14. "The fifth amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees that no private property shall be taken for a public use without the payment of just compensation."
Author: Elton Gallegly

15. "The courts are using the First Amendment to attack religion, when they should be using it to protect religion."
Author: Ernest Istook

16. "I believe that nothing enjoys a higher estate in our society than the right given by the First and Fourteenth Amendments freely to practice and proclaim one's religious convictions."
Author: Frank Murphy

17. "Primaries are a family fight. I'm a pro-free enterprise, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life Republican."
Author: Heather Wilson

18. "We can adhere to the Henry Hyde amendment by saying that no federal funds will be used for abortions. And that's the bottom line for me."
Author: Henry Cuellar

19. "And, as you recall, last year, people were asking us, don't vote on the bill until you read every part of the bill. So, as a good attorney and as a good legislator, I think it's my responsibility to read the amendments."
Author: Henry Cuellar

20. "After a week of back and forth, and forth and back over firearms, it's good to see a consensus developing on this common-sense amendment to keep handguns away from children."
Author: Herb Kohl

21. "Religion should be subject to commonsense appraisal and rational review, as openly discussible as, say, politics, art and the weather. The First Amendment, we should recall, forbids Congress both from establishing laws designating a state religion and from abridging freedom of speech. There is no reason why we should shy away from speaking freely about religion, no reason why it should be thought impolite to debate it, especially when, as so often happens, religious folk bring it up on their own and try to impose it on others."
Author: Jeffrey Tayler

22. "Because this law could mean so much or so little, it held potential for causing great mischief in the world of art and politics. We needed to reduce its uncertainty, and the best way to do that, I believed, was to force a court to interpret it, which would either void or narrow the law. To make it as broad a target as possible and to assure that someone would sue us, I reproduced the Helms amendment verbatim in the terms and conditions for grant recipients. It could not be ignored there, and if it was to be declared unconstitutional, it had to appear where the courts could not ignore it either."
Author: John Frohnmayer

23. "A justice is not like a law professor, who might say, 'This is my theory... and this is what I'm going to be faithful to and consistent with,' and in twenty years will look back and say, 'I had a consistent theory of the First Amendment as applied to a particular area.'"
Author: John Roberts

24. "It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

25. "Any time someone carries a picket sign in front of the White House, that is the First Amendment in action."
Author: Julian Bond

26. "In my political career, I'd like to see a constitutional balanced budget amendment."
Author: Ken Buck

27. "It's funny that we need laws so people can have the freedom to do what they want when we already have the constitution where the 1st amendment allows us to do what we want already. Gay marriage should not be a political matter they are people just like everyone else and have the right to do what they want like everyone else. If NYS/US would take half the effort into the economy or education we wouldn't be as fucked as we are now."
Author: Kenneth G. Ortiz

28. "All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

29. "I propose a Constitutional Amendment providing that, if any public official, elected or appointed, at any level of government, is caught lying to any member of the public for any reason, the punishment shall be death by public hanging."
Author: L. Neil Smith

30. "...Subordination of the state to Christian values is precisely what the early Puritans, even those in the tradition of the Mayflower Pilgrims, aimed to do. The First Amendment notwithstanding, large numbers of the American public (especially churchgoing Protestant Christians) have embodied this Puritan way of thinking, viewing America as a "Christan nation." Relatively recent poll data bear out the enduring character of these Puritan convictions. According to a Pew Forum poll held just prior to the 2004 election, over one-half of the public would have reservations voting for a candidate with no religious affiliation (31 percent refusing to vote for a Muslim and 15 percent for a Catholic)."
Author: Mark Ellingsen

31. "And, finally, as a Republican, I believe it is important to keep our word and keep our covenant, and that is exactly what we should do with the Wright amendment today."
Author: Michael Burgess

32. "The 'takings' clause of the Fifth Amendment is for conservatives what the equal protection clause of the 14th is for liberals."
Author: Michael Kinsley

33. "I do support a constitutional amendment on marriage between a man and a woman, but I would not be going into the states to overturn their state law."
Author: Michele Bachmann

34. "Amendment to live by-J.O.Y.Jesus first, Others second, Yourself last."
Author: Michelle Duggar

35. "It is time we passed a balanced budget amendment and return this government to limited spending."
Author: Newt Gingrich

36. "When three liberals get together they form a new party; that is their idea of individualism. They never join a bowling club without introducing as part of the 'agenda' an 'amendment of the statutes."
Author: Oswald Spengler

37. "The 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."
Author: Peter King

38. "The debate about the war seems pretty robust and free. Many publications, from the New Yorker to the Nation, feel perfectly comfortable printing anti-American articles and that's fine. That's what the First Amendment is all about."
Author: Rich Lowry

39. "The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law."
Author: Robert Bork

40. "I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out."
Author: Roger Ebert

41. "I don't think we'll solve the problem of the deficit until three things happen: We need more discipline on spending in Congress. We need a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget. And we need to give our presidents a line-item veto."
Author: Ronald Reagan

42. "In 2003, this House voted to kill a Democratic amendment to add $250 million for port security grants; then again, in 2005, against a Democratic proposal calling for an additional $400 million in funding for port security."
Author: Russ Carnahan

43. "It's all right to agree or disagree on the balanced budget amendment. It's all right to talk about how we're going to appropriate."
Author: Sheila Jackson Lee

44. "For 180 years, we voted in English. That is the true American tradition, and this amendment is true to our heritage, not what has existed unnaturally for the last 20 years."
Author: Spencer Bachus

45. "I'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."
Author: Ted Nugent

46. "Every man — in the development of his own personality — has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man's essential nature."[Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)]"
Author: Thomas I. Emerson

47. "Some 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...But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times."
Author: Thomas Jefferson

48. "Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish."
Author: Thurgood Marshall

49. "If 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."
Author: Thurgood Marshall

50. "No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment."
Author: William O. Douglas

Amendment Quotes Pictures