Quotes: Constitution

We know no document is perfect, but when we amend the Constitution, it would be to expand rights, not to take away rights from decent, loyal Americans. This great Constitution of ours should never be used to make a group of Americans permanent second-class citizens.

It took us in this country 11 years to get from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution.

The American Constitution is the greatest governing document, and at some 7,000 words, just about the shortest.

The Constitution of the United States was made by white men, the citizens and representatives of twelve slaveholding and one non-slaveholding State; and it was made for white men.

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.

The basic guarantees of our Constitution are warrants for the here and now, and unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason, they are to be promptly fulfilled.

The Constitution guarantees us our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s all. It doesn’t guarantee our rights to charity.

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.

The constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.

Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.