Constitution Quotes
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The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone ashes: insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution.
Tobias Smollett
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Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.
William J. Brennan, Jr.
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The court is really the keeper of the conscience, and the conscience is the Constitution.
William O. Douglas
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The aim of the Constitutional Treaty was to be more readable; the aim of this treaty is to be unreadable ... The Constitution aimed to be clear, whereas this Treaty had to be unclear. It is a success.
Karel De Gucht
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The situation of the general government, if it can be called a government, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned by every blast.
George Washington
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But I deny that the Constitution recognizes property in man.
William H. Seward
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Our current constitution does indeed concentrate too much power and resources at the centre, which has impeded national development.
Atiku Abubakar
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It has been more than 60 years since the constitution was put in place. There are provisions in the constitution that no longer suit the times. Since the constitution was promulgated, we've seen the emergence of new values, such as privacy, the environment and so on, which need to be incorporated.
Shinzo Abe
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Who are we? We are people who love drugs. They say we like drugs. It's true. Especially marijuana. Marijuana has been good for us. God put it here for a reason and we need to find a way to live with it in peace. But we are also people who hate drugs. We have suffered from overdoses and addiction. But we know that drugs are here to stay, and prohibition and the criminal justice system is not the way to deal with it. And we are people who don't care about drugs. People who care about the Constitution, who care about 2.2 million Americans behind bars, who care about fundamental rights and freedoms.
Ethan Nadelmann
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We hold that the Constitution does not forbid the states minor intrusions into an individual's body under stringently limited conditions.
William J. Brennan, Jr.
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English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts.
James Anthony Froude
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The Constitution—the Bill of Rights in particular—was filled with “majestic generalities” precisely so that federal courts could breathe life into them as the reality of America changed.
Barry W. Lynn
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But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.
William H. Seward
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A constitution should be framed so as not to impede the action of government, nor force the government to its violation.
Napoleon Bonaparte
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That is, no matther whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' supreme coort follows th' iliction returns.
Finley Peter Dunne
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The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights.
Erwin Griswold
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To me the separation of church and state is a thread that ought to run through public policy so that we can always recognize that we make laws in this country, based not on theology of any particular group, but on the basis of a commonly shared values of the Constitution itself.
Barry W. Lynn
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More fundamentally, however, the answer to petitioners' objection is that there can be no impairment of executive power, whether on the state or federal level, where actions pursuant to that power are impermissible under the Constitution. Where there is no power, there can be no impairment of power.
William J. Brennan, Jr.
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My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.
Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr.
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We trace the hand of the Almighty in framing the constitution of our land, and believe that the Lord raised up men purposely for the accomplishment of this object, raised them up and inspired them to frame the Constitution of the United States
Lorenzo Snow
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A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination.
John Stuart Mill
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The fact that the Constitution is sufficiently open-ended to infuriate all Americans almost equally is part of its enduring genius.
Dahlia Lithwick
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I believe to my core that there’s only one right way to do this job, and that is with strict independence. By the book. Playing it straight. Faithful to the Constitution. Chris Wray VOWS' STRICT INDEPENDENCE' IN CONFIRMATION HEARING During Tuesday's vote before the full Senate Judiciary Committee, all five nay votes came from liberal Democrats : Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
Christopher Wray
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If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution framed in the Convention where I had the honor to preside might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it.
George Washington
