The Constitution Quotes

1. "If any man at this day sincerely believes that a proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbids the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories, he is right to say so, and to enforce his position by all truthful evidence and fair argument which he can. But he has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live" were of the same opinion - thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument."
Author: Abraham Lincoln

2. "I will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. It is not the Constitution as I would like to have it, but as it is, that is to be defended. The Constitution will not be preserved & defended until it is enforced & obeyed in every part of every one of the United States. It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced and defended, and let the grass grow where it may."
Author: Abraham Lincoln

3. "Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard, don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like."
Author: Alan M. Dershowitz

4. "Honest conviction is my courage; the Constitution is my guide."
Author: Andrew Johnson

5. "If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless."
Author: Antonin Scalia

6. "The signers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution were inspired from on high to do that work."
Author: Brigham Young

7. "Upon the Constitution, upon the pre-existing legal rights of the People, as understood in this country and in England, I have argued that this House is bound to revive the Petition under debate."
Author: Caleb Cushing

8. "Some of them, in accepting the proposed plan of government, coupled their acceptance with a recommendation of various additions to the Constitution, which they deemed essential to the preservation of the rights of the States, or of the People."
Author: Caleb Cushing

9. "While men's rights are guaranteed by specific language in the Constitution, women's equal rights aren't mentioned."
Author: Carolyn Maloney

10. "Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers."
Author: Chris Hedges

11. "Unfortunately, people are re-interpreting the Constitution as a living document, and it's not. It's a solid-based document and it shouldn't be played with."
Author: Chuck Norris

12. "For thirty years, beginning with the invention of a privacy right in the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, the Left has been waging a systematic assault on the constitutional foundation of the nation."
Author: David Horowitz

13. "Neither James Madison, for whom this lecture is named, nor any of the other Framers of the Constitution, were oblivious, careless, or otherwise unaware of the words they chose for the document and its Bill of Rights."
Author: Diane Wood

14. "It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers."
Author: Diane Wood

15. "All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them."
Author: Felix Frankfurter

16. "But let us be sure of something. We are not sheep. This government is ours, and it is meant to serve our best interests. And if it has grown into something it shouldn't be, and shucked off the rules of the Constitution it was based on, then it is our responsibility to rein it back in."
Author: Gary Hansen

17. "I've always had questions about what it meant to be a protester, to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace, who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody, are they really the radicals? We're not protesting from the outside. We're inside."
Author: Gil Scott Heron

18. "The adoption by Jefferson and the Republicans of the political structure of their opponents is of an importance hardly inferior to that of the adoption of the Constitution by the states."
Author: Herbert Croly

19. "One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights."
Author: James K. Polk

20. "Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression."
Author: James K. Polk

21. "When I came here, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. I didn't put my hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."
Author: Jesse Jackson

22. "When we wrote the Constitution, the intention was to give the commander in chief the authority how to use the forces when you authorize him to be able to use the forces."
Author: Joe Biden

23. "Attending that Convention and talking with those people and many others convinced me that I should become a blogger in my efforts to reform the government and uphold the integrity of the Constitution and the laws made in furtherance thereof."
Author: John Jay Hooker

24. "...pointed out that the corporation enjoys the same rights as a living person under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This concept was upheld in 1886 by the Supreme Court in 'Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company' and has been a fact of law ever since. I emphasized to those executives that the corporation should also be required to accept the same responsibilities as those expected of a person; it too should be a good citizen, an honorable, ethical member of the community. In the case of international corporations, that community has to be defined as the world."
Author: John Perkins

25. "By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority."
Author: John Roberts

26. "Even this nation (the US) will be on the very verge of crumbling to pieces and tumbling to the ground, and when the Constitution is upon the brink of ruin, this people will be the staff upon which the nation shall lean, and they shall bear the Constitution away from the very verge of destruction."
Author: Joseph Smith Jr.

27. "We say, that the Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God."
Author: Joseph Smith Jr.

28. "I will forever be thankful to the Malawians and international community, and my professional army and army general, who said: 'No, we will follow the constitution.' That's why I'm here."
Author: Joyce Banda

29. "No Congress ever has seen fit to amend the Constitution to address any issue related to marriage. No Constitutional Amendment was needed to ban polygamy or bigamy, nor was a Constitutional Amendment needed to set a uniform age of majority to ban child marriages."
Author: Judy Biggert

30. "If the constitution goes, I go."
Author: Kamisese Mara

31. "In fact, my mom always told me because I was the daughter of an Army officer born overseas in Paris, France, that under the Constitution she believed that I could never run for president."
Author: Karen Hughes

32. "When I left, Mr. Chairman, I had the constitutional right to freedom of speech. Has that right been stripped from the American people while I was gone?"
Author: Kenneth Eade

33. "Today, no less than five Supreme Court justices are on record, either through their opinions or speeches (or both), that they will consult foreign law and foreign-court rulings for guidance in certain circumstances. Of course, policymakers are free to consult whatever they want, but not justices. They're limited to the Constitution and the law."
Author: Mark R. Levin

34. "For myself, therefore, I desire to declare that the principle that will govern me in the high duty to which my country calls me is a strict adherence to the letter and spirit of the Constitution as it was designed by those who framed it."
Author: Martin Van Buren

35. "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 for the thought that we hate."
Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

36. "We have a tremendous lack of knowledge of how far we have gotten away from the Constitution of the United States. Democrats and Republicans alike have taken us away from the original intent. You see, I believe in this document as our founding fathers intended it."
Author: Paul Broun

37. "Jefferson feared that Hamilton had plans radically at odds with the Constitution. As he saw it, Hamilton wanted to warp the federal government out of constitutional shape, converting it into a copy of the British government, built on debt, corruption, and influence. Hamilton's goal, Jefferson charged, was to ally the rich and well born with the government at the people's expense, creating a corrupt aristocracy leagued with the government against the people and destroying the virtue that was the basis of republican government. Only a republic could preserve liberty, Jefferson insisted, and only virtue among the people could preserve a republic."
Author: R.B. Bernstein

38. "Mr. Taylor has this habit of emphasizing his point by using three adjectives or verbs in a row. 'Class, you must know,' Simon begins [imitating] in a droning voice, flinging her arms around at every syllable, 'that should you fail to understand, to comprehend, to FEEL the power of the Constitution's words you will lose, forfeit, SURRENDER your ability to master the meaning of this most important document. You must read with an open mind in order to nurture, care for, and FOSTER your citizenship. Do I make myself clear, succinct, and COMPREHENSIBLE?"
Author: Randa Abdel Fattah

39. "We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against."
Author: Ray Bradbury

40. "It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people's liberties that is in jeopardy. That is why I wrote 'Losing America.'"
Author: Robert Byrd

41. "I wish I could set deadlines for the Congress, but that's just not the way the Constitution is written."
Author: Robert M. Gates

42. "In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract liberty. Conservatives, knowing that "liberty inheres in some sensible object," are aware that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable "liberty" at the expense of order, the libertarians imperil the very freedoms they praise."
Author: Russell Kirk

43. "I didn't say 'former president,' I said 'president,' and I have the constitutional rights according to the constitution, including immunity from prosecution."
Author: Saddam Hussein

44. "Our government leaders... have made many mistakes in the past when they have lost sight of the sacred American values rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We are at the brink of even graver mistakes and assaults on these values."
Author: Samuel Dash

45. "Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high!"
Author: Stephen Colbert

46. "We are witnessing a great awakening. Millions of Texans, millions of Americans are rising up to reclaim our country, to defend liberty and to restore the Constitution."
Author: Ted Cruz

47. "Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go."
Author: Walter Lippmann

48. "I submit, on the other hand, most respectfully, that the Constitution not merely does not affirm that principle, but, on the contrary, altogether excludes it."
Author: William H. Seward

49. "But the Constitution was made not only for southern and northern states, but for states neither northern nor southern, namely, the western states, their coming in being foreseen and provided for."
Author: William H. Seward

50. "Eisenhower has been much criticized for his failure publicly to endorse the Court's decision. But he felt that doing so would set an undesirable precedent. If a president endorsed decisions he agreed with, might he feel compelled to oppose decisions he did not agree with? And what would that do to the rule of law? "The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold ... the constitutional processes.... I will obey."3"
Author: William J. Bennett

The Constitution Quotes Pictures