Top 100 Constitutional Quotes
#1. No higher proof exists of the strength of popular government than, though the chosen of the people be struck down, his constitutional successor is peacefully installed without shock or strain.
Chester A. Arthur
#2. As President, I have no eyes but constitutional eyes; I cannot see you.
Abraham Lincoln
#3. We have a social responsibility, a constitutional opportunity and a moral obligation to help others.
Janie Lewis
#4. Because marriage is a sacred institution and the foundation of society, it should not be redefined by activist judges. For the good of families, children and society, I support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage.
George W. Bush
#5. People for the American Way says it has yet to find anyone who has made a stronger case against the proposed school prayer Constitutional amendment ... What kind of prayer would we use?
Cal Thomas
#6. But you answer, that the Constitution recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply, that this constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations.
William H. Seward
#7. I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.
Victoria Woodhull
#8. The first lesson, for all Canadians, is that the closed door, top down approaches to constitution making do not provide the public input or debate necessary to achieve a constitutional consensus that will be supported by the people.
Preston Manning
#9. A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.
Walter Bagehot
#10. I think that the Court's task, in this as in all areas of constitutional adjudication, is not responsibly aided by the uncritical invocation of metaphors like the ' wall of separation,' a phrase nowhere to be found in the Constitution.
Potter Stewart
#11. Labour's constitutional blueprint is nothing less than a plan for the destruction of UK democracy.
John Redwood
#12. Who is an elected government in a constitutional democracy to decide it will not tolerate dissent.
Christina Engela
#13. The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today.
Thurgood Marshall
#14. These enemies of society are to be driven out of New York regardless of their constitutional rights.' The
Martin Cruz Smith
#15. The real fabric of American society is not all those flags you see on people's cars ... it's in the Bill of Rights and in our constitutional form of government.
John Adams
#16. Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, they are incidental to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages.
Benjamin Disraeli
#17. Consequences flow from a justice's interpretation in a direct and immediate way. A judicial decision respecting the incompatibility of Jim Crow with a constitutional guarantee of equality is not simply a contemplative exercise in defining the shape of a just society. It is an order
William J. Brennan
#18. I think it is appropriate that we pay tribute to this great constitutional principle which is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution: the principle of religious independence, of religious liberty, of religious freedom.
John F. Kennedy
#19. When law enforcers are shown to have such unswerving integrity, only the most churlish among us would question the methods they use to "get their man." Constitutional guarantees are regarded as bothersome "technicalities" that impede honest law enforcers in the performance of their duties.
Donna Woolfolk Cross
#20. This is the constitutional limitation of man's knowledge and interests, the fact that he cannot know more than a tiny part of the whole of society and that therefore all that can enter into his motives are the immediate effects which his actions will have in the sphere he knows.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#21. I will say, nothing in my time in the Senate has more surprised me than senators and House members want to weigh in on everything under the sun, but they do not want to weigh in on a clearly defined constitutional duty to declare war. It just stuns me.
Tim Kaine
#22. These various interests are well organized, command more wealth than most modern nations, and are represented in Congress with a strength far greater than is justified in any constitutional or democratic sense. (Modern politics is expensive - power follows money.)
Edward Abbey
#23. A constitutional amendment for congressional term limits could never achieve the blessing of Congress; it could be initiated only by the states.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#24. In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we shd. not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. [James Madison in the U.S. Constitutional Convention, June 26, 1787. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 1:422.]
James Madison
#25. The Second Amendment is a constitutional right. I didn't make it up, the Republican Party didn't make it up. It's in the Constitution. I think it's just as important as any of the other rights in our constitution.
Marco Rubio
#26. There's a lot of the Midwest and the West in Justice Rehnquist's approach to constitutional law. And by that I mean a recognition that people know pretty well how to govern themselves, that government that is closest to the people is apt to be more responsive to their legitimate concerns and needs.
John Roberts
#27. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of Government. But what is Government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
James Madison
#28. Anchor babies are "citizens" only because of a phony constitutional principle cooked up by Justice William Brennan in 1982. Just like abortion, sodomy, gay marriage, and unicorns - it's in the Constitution!
Ann Coulter
#29. There are more than 30 states, who either by statute or constitutional amendment, have defined marriage as being between a man and a woman.
John Thune
#30. Indeed, the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation.
Charles Krauthammer
#31. It was important for the Supreme Court to say it's a matter of constitutional law that everyone is equal, to say everyone is entitled to the dignity that comes from being married to the person you love.
David Boies
#32. Our constitutional liberties shall not be sacrificed in our search for greater security, for that is what our enemies and all enemies of freedom and democracy hope to achieve.
Tammy Baldwin
#33. You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.
Gore Vidal
#34. If nothing else came out of all of this debacle over Obamacare, one thing that should is a class-action lawsuit against the University of Chicago Law School for people that had Obama as their constitutional law professor.
Louie Gohmert
#35. We are a constitutional monarchy. I don't order laws, I propose them. Article 35 of our constitution states that the king can only refuse a law of parliament once, then he has to sign it - if the same law is then supported by a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament.
Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa
#36. We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#37. The question is: how bad do things have to get before you will do something about it? Where is your line in the sand? If you don't enforce the constitutional limitations on your government very soon, you are likely to find out what World War III will be like.
Michael Badnarik
#38. One might plausibly contend that Congress violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers when it exonerates itself from the impositions of the laws it obligates people outside the legislature to obey.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#39. Presidents and speakers for over 100 years had tried to pass affordable care for all Americans. It was challenged over and over. The Supreme Court declared it constitutional.
Nancy Pelosi
#40. [I]n the next place, to show that unless these departments be so far connected and blended as to give to each a constitutional control over the others, the degree of separation which the maxim requires, as essential to a free government, can never in practice be duly maintained.
James Madison
#41. The Government have made it clear that the constitutional treaty will be ratified in the UK only after a referendum.
Geoff Hoon
#42. I believe neither the French nor the Dutch really rejected the constitutional treaty.
Jean-Claude Juncker
#43. As America slept, our constitutional quilt was slowly being unraveled by special interest... I hope you like the cold.
A.J. Garces
#44. So now we're after a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a guy-and-gal thing. To the founders, this would have been like an amendment requiring the sun to rise in the east; it would fall under the category of obvious truths that the Constitution need not address.
James Lileks
#45. The United States cannot and should not discriminate on the basis of religion. The free exercise of religion is at the very heart of our constitutional guarantee for all persons of this country.
Mike Pence
#46. If the federal government won't secure the border, the State of Arizona will step in to complement federal efforts in a constitutional manner and protect the security of its citizens.
Jan Brewer
#47. American citizens should not lose their constitutional rights because they lack the money to pay for them.
Bernard B. Kerik
#48. The United States Constitutional Convention, except for three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary.
Benjamin Franklin
#49. I do not support a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage.
Corrine Brown
#50. Since Congress makes the laws they are under the delusion that anything they do is legal, no matter if it is unwise, unethical, or un-Constitutional.
Jim Babka
#51. If the constitutional treaty is rejected it will be back to square one, just at a time when we want Europe to be a more effective force for good in the world, when we need to buttress ourselves against the pressures and insecurities of globalization.
Peter Mandelson
#52. The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.
Ron Paul
#53. Andrew Jackson was the first president to claim that the desires of the public overrode Congress's constitutional prerogatives. Virtually every president since Jackson has claimed the mantle, even while lacking two ingredients of an electoral mandate: a landslide victory and a specific agenda.
Ron Fournier
#54. Now I don't know why he's denying them habeas corpus. I can only assume the guys they got detained over there did something really unforgivable. Like remind Obama he was once a professor of Constitutional Law.
Stephen Colbert
#55. Obama might think of himself as one, but he is not a dictator. We are not a banana republic yet. This is not an authoritarian form of government. This is a constitutional republic, and the president doesn't allow or disallow. The president can't buy or purchase.
Rush Limbaugh
#56. When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.
William O. Douglas
#57. I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife.
Gore Vidal
#58. Laws are made with such attention to protecting women that, if a man's constitutional rights conflict with a woman's protection, his rights disintegrate before her protection disintegrates.
Warren Farrell
#59. In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.
Robert Bork
#60. Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution.
W. Cleon Skousen
#61. The constitutional questions are in the first instance not questions of right but questions of might.
Ferdinand Lassalle
#62. Have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress.
John Marshall
#63. There is no right by the federal or state constitution to manual recounts. There is no law that says that you must count dimpled ballots, constitutional or otherwise.
Bill Vaughan
#64. If Charlton Heston can have a constitutional right carry a rifle, why can't grandma have a constitutional right to health care?
Al Sharpton
#66. When we demand liberty of a person as a constitutional right, we are taking away from the officials their liberty to chop off people's heads.
Lin Yutang
#67. Something that came as a shock to me is that we do not have a constitutional right to vote. And that's not just a fun little historical factoid. It actually has huge ramifications. It's the reason our system is so decentralized - in other words, chaotic.
Mo Rocca
#68. Even if the Constitution of the United States had intended to recognize slavery, as a constitutional state institution, such intended recognition would have failed of effect, and been legally void, because slavery then had no constitutional existence to be recognized.
Lysander Spooner
#69. It was the separation of powers upon which the framers placed their hopes for the preservation of the people's liberties. Despite this heritage, the congress has been in too many cases more than willing to walk away from its constitutional powers.
Robert Byrd
#70. It is clear that the flame of True Freedom had passed with naval supremacy and constitutional, consultative government from the United Provinces to Great Britain, where it was regarded with quite as much national pride.
Peter Padfield
#71. President Obama's decision to bypass the constitutional advice and consent of the Senate is not an isolated incident.
Chuck Grassley
#72. We're seeing is young people who are optimistic, who want a future, want our constitutional rights, are coming to our campaign.
Ted Cruz
#73. Our task is nothing less than the creation of a new constitutional order for a new united Europe.
Peter Hain
#74. With that in mind and in celebration of National Prayer Day, today I have proposed in the House of Representatives a Constitutional Amendment that would restore voluntary prayer in our Nation's schools.
Nick Rahall
#75. Now judicial review, beloved by conservatives, can, of course, fulfill the excellent function of declaring government interventions and tyrannies unconstitutional. But it can also validate and legitimize the government in the eyes of the people by declaring these actions valid and constitutional.
Murray Rothbard
#76. If there is any truth to the old proverb that "one who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client," the Court now bestows a constitutional right on one to make a fool of himself.
Harry A. Blackmun
#77. Justice William Brennan stated that the phrase 'under God' in our Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional because it no longer has a religious purpose or meaning.
Mathew Staver
#78. 'This is how democracy works,' Barack Obama lectured the country before giving everyone the specifics of his expansive one-man executive overreach on immigration. If you enjoy platitudinous straw men but are turned off by open debate and constitutional order, this speech was for you.
David Harsanyi
#79. When dealing with illegal immigration, the answer is simple; enforce Constitutional mandates, and you will protect Floridians and the American people.
Allen West
#80. The cause of laziness is physiological; it is an infirmity of the constitution, and its victim is as much to be pitied as a sufferer from any other constitutional infirmity. It is even worse than many other diseases; from them the patient may recover, while this is incurable.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#81. Our country is not in crisis; there are no tanks in the streets. No matter what the outcome of the president's situation, life in America will go on. Our lives will continue to be filled with practical matters, not constitutional ones.
Jennifer Dunn
#82. I will, based on the existing ROC constitutional system, based on democratic principles, on the basis of the largest public opinion, promote cross-strait policy.
Tsai Ing-wen
#83. But there are some persons who wouldpersuade the people never to make use of their constitutional rights.
Samuel Adams
#84. It is in vain to oppose constitutional barriers to the impulse of self-preservation. It is worse than in vain; because it plants in the Constitution itself necessary usurpations of power, every precedent of which is a germ of unnecessary and multiplied repetitions.
James Madison
#85. Among the most famous of these Supreme Court cases of exercise of political power I believe are the cases of Roe V. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, two 1973 cases based on false statements which created a constitutional right to abortion.
Sam Brownback
#86. Presidents have the right to nominate their own cabinet secretaries. But their nominees don't have a right to confirmation. Senators have a constitutional duty to advise and consent to the appointment of all Cabinet officials. They should take that duty seriously.
Gary Bauer
#87. One way or the other , the case coming before a federal judge in Miami July 2 challenging Florida's 6-year-old constitutional ban on same-sex marriages could be the next shoe to drop.
Anonymous
#88. He's practicing his Constitutional right to be a jackass.
Julie Miller
#89. We must condemn those who are perpetuating the violence, and not the individuals who engage in the pursuit of their constitutional rights.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#90. As a matter of traditional and sound constitutional doctrine, an amendment to the Constitution should be the last resort when all other measures have proved inadequate.
Arlen Specter
#91. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than any [constitutional] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.
Roger Brooke Taney
#92. Any new gun control is simply gonna infringe on the law-abiding ability to exercise constitutional rights. There's not a single law that could be written, that has been written, that could be passed that would stop Omar Mateen from getting a gun and shooting people up.
Rush Limbaugh
#93. Expect the rapidly expanding homeschool movement to play a significant role in the revolutionary reforms needed to rebuild a free society with constitutional protections.
Ron Paul
#94. Anyone who takes a seat in the Bundestag does so within a Europeanized constitutional framework.
Udo Di Fabio
#95. I am not a federal employee. I am a constitutional officer. My job is the Constitution of the United States, I am not a government employee. I am in the Constitution.
Tom DeLay
#96. She seems somewhat morose and out of sorts. Do you beat her often?'
'I must admit that I do not.'
'There is the answer! Beat her well; beat her often! It will bring roses to her cheeks! There is nothing better to induce good cheer in a woman than a fine constitutional beating.
Jack Vance
#97. They have accorded me my constitutional rights, and that is to their credit because the media hate campaign against me has been so intense and so vicious that it's a miracle that the police have taken such a professional approach.
Ernst Zundel
#98. We would be false to our trust if we allowed the time it takes to give effect to constitutional rights to be used as the very reason for taking away those rights.
Frank Murphy
#99. The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least.
Richard Dawkins
#100. People do not have a constitutional right to be married any more than we could say that someone has a constitutional right to a driver's license. You either meet the requirements or you don't. In the case of marriage, homosexuals do not meet the requirements of marriage.
Erwin W. Lutzer
