Quotes About Constitutional Rights

#1. My judgment is that neither House of Congress, nor both combined, have any right to interfere in the count. It is for the Vice-President to do it all ... There should be no compromise of our Constitutional rights.

Rutherford B. Hayes

#2. 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.

#3. 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

#4. If the president is allowed to suspend constitutional rights on his own personal whims, our free republic has effectively ceased to exist.

Steve Stockman

#5. But there are some persons who wouldpersuade the people never to make use of their constitutional rights.

Samuel Adams

#6. We're seeing is young people who are optimistic, who want a future, want our constitutional rights, are coming to our campaign.

Ted Cruz

#7. During times of emergencies, civil crisis, or natural disasters it is important for persons to remain free to exercise their constitutional rights in a lawful and appropriate manner, and I believe it is important that we provide individuals with specific reassurance that we value those rights.

Colleen Hanabusa

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. American citizens should not lose their constitutional rights because they lack the money to pay for them.

Bernard B. Kerik

#11. 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

#12. These enemies of society are to be driven out of New York regardless of their constitutional rights.' The

Martin Cruz Smith

#13. Corporations are not legal "persons" with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.

Kalle Lasn

#14. The more that voting is glorified as a panacea, the more lackadaisical people become about preserving their constitutional rights.

James Bovard

#15. I think that, as Americans, we should never forget that when we tamper with freedom of speech, it is a very sensitive issue that affects all of our constitutional rights and privileges.

Charles B. Rangel

#16. You hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist!' You never hear a real American talk like that.

Frank Hague

#17. [There is] a duty in refusing to cooperate in any undertaking that violates the Constitutional rights of the individual. This holds in particular for all inquisitions that are concerned with the private life and the political affiliations of the citizens.

Albert Einstein

#18. Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#19. No Ordinary American Cares About Their Constitutional Rights

Joe Biden

#20. In this film George presents issues that are important, essential and vital, whoever you are, about constitutional rights and the bedrock of a democracy. I am drawn to those kinds of stories because they inspire me - they are responsible to a populace and responsible to man.

David Strathairn

#21. Blessed be the memory of those few brethren who contended so strenuously for their constitutional rights and religious freedom, against such an overwhelming force of desperadoes!

Joseph Smith Jr.

#22. The entire future of marriage rests with Justice Anthony Kennedy, the man who declared in Citizens United that corporations are people with constitutional rights. I just hope he doesn't do anything rash, like declare that homosexuals are people with constitutional rights.

Stephen Colbert

#23. Civil libertarians have raised concerns that some of the Patriot Act's provisions infringe on Constitutional rights. Those concerns are not supported by the facts.

Roger Wicker

#24. If you ask someone whether our Constitutional rights are being flushed down the porcelain oubliette, and their response is, "If I answer that honestly they'll arrest me," then you already have your answer.

Robert X. Cringely

#25. I wish I had a man and not a dishrag printed over with big words like 'constitutional rights' and 'progress'!

Christina Stead

#26. I don't think it's a lack of will. I think it's an issue of what people view as constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment, number one, and what customers and business partners expect around the world from secure computing systems. And it's a difference of view.

Rod Beckstrom

#27. History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

Thurgood Marshall

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. There is nobody that I know who believes that Bank of America is a human being who should be entitled for the same constitutional rights that the people of our country are.

Bernie Sanders

#31. Historically, the court has been the forum to which individuals can turn when they believed their constitutional rights were violated. This has been especially noteworthy in the arena of civil rights.

Dianne Feinstein

#32. I went to Ferguson and walked with the demonstrators and saw this heavily armed police force, tactical units pointing sniper rifles at my constituents who were there exercising their constitutional rights.

William Lacy Clay Jr.

#33. We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.

Rand Paul

#34. The police have no right to do what they have been doing to the protesters. Their behavior has been designed to chill the protester's constitutional rights. This judge's ruling is wonderful.

James Lafferty

#35. Censorship does not interfere with the constitutional rights of every American to sit alone in a dark room in the nude and cuss.

Pat Paulsen

#36. politicians and pundits tell you what your rights are. Read this book to learn your constitutional rights and together, we can keep the spirit of freedom alive in this great nation. Click here to view this

Sean Patrick

#37. Whether I am or am not a Communist is irrelevant. The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, may enjoy their constitutional rights.

Paul Robeson

#38. Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.

Pete Stark

#39. The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure.

Albert Einstein

#40. I still want my right to defend myself. A railroad operation, and you know it, from Nixon on down. they got you running around violating my constitutional rights.

Bobby Seale

#41. I didn't say 'former president,' I said 'president,' and I have the constitutional rights according to the constitution, including immunity from prosecution.

Saddam Hussein

#42. As far as military necessity will permit, religiously respect the constitutional rights of all.

George B. McClellan

#43. Edward Snowden isn't a traitor. He reported the crime of conspiracy to deny citizens of their constitutional rights.

David Chiles

#44. Obama's failure to close Guantanamo is yet another instance where the rhetoric of democratic and constitutional rights proved not useful for his international relations, relations which are always pursued in ways that continue to link and fortify securitarian power with the opening of new markets.

Judith Butler

#45. My belief has always been ... that wherever in this land any individual's constitutional rights are being unjustly denied, it is the obligation of the federal government-at point of bayonet if necessary-to restore that individual's constitutional rights

Ronald Reagan

#46. We filed a constitutional rights lawsuit on my reservation, and I had to go out and interview all these old people. And I found that many of the old people on my reservation didn't know who was president. That kind of pointed out to me the irrelevance at times of who is in Washington.

Winona LaDuke

#47. Conservatives believe in providing Constitutional rights to our citizens, not to enemy combatants like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Mitt Romney

#48. People who want to come to this country don't have constitutional rights. Once they get here, they do. But coming here is not a constitutional right. So with do, as a nation, have the ability and should have the ability to decide who comes here and when they come here.

Rand Paul

#49. President Bush has asserted the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on any American without a warrant in the name of fighting terrorism. He has asserted presidential power beyond stated constitutional rights, and there is no Republican gutsy enough to call his hand.

Helen Thomas

#50. Our political and constitutional rights, so called, are but the natural and inherent rights of man, asserted, carried out, and secured by modes of human contrivance.

Gerrit Smith

#51. Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture.

Orrin Hatch

#52. The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.

Hannah Arendt

#53. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Abe Fortas

#54. The Patriot Act has practically obliterated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. It was supposed to be temporary, but there are so many things that the Government likes about the power that it gives, they keep renewing it.

Kenneth Eade

#55. Courts are supposed to interpret laws to avoid 'absurd results' and to avoid constitutional problems - such as infringing on the free speech rights of Americans.

Marvin Ammori

#56. Our Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a court of conjecture and political fad.

A.E. Samaan

#57. A freedom given up is not so easily regained.

Rivera Sun

#58. Liberty is not something a government gives you. It is a right that no government can legally take away.

A.E. Samaan

#59. We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

Robert H. Jackson

#64. The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.

Walter Bagehot

#65. Dude, this transcends politics. George W. Bush is wiping his ass with the Constitution.

Kenneth Eade

#66. Democracy is not just constitutional and legislative rules; it is a culture and practice and adhering by the law and respecting international human rights principles.

Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa

#67. The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted.

Henry Steele Commager

#68. 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?

Kenneth Eade

#69. While the Right of Suffrage is conceded to thousands notoriously ignorant, vicious, and drunken, ... a Constitutional denial to Black men, as such, of Political Rights freely secured to White men, is monstrously unjust and irrational.

Horace Greeley

#70. History could not be any clearer: Rights given by fad and fashion are just as easily taken away. The Constitution matters.

A.E. Samaan

#71. For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.

Barack Obama

#72. I found that I was getting a warm reception for my message of freeing you from the income tax, releasing you from Social Security, ending the insane war on drugs, restoring gun rights, and reducing the federal government to just its constitutional functions.

Harry Browne

#73. We need a constitutional amendment to allow the legislature to control the so-called free speech rights of corporations.

Hank Johnson

#74. I don't say women's rights - I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#75. The Bill of Rights wasn't enacted to give us any rights. It was enacted so the Government could not take away from us any rights that we already had.

Kenneth Eade

#76. Nothing is more important in the preservation of peace than to secure among the great mass of the people living under constitutional government a just conception of the rights which their nation has against others and of the duties their nation owes to others.

Elihu Root

#77. In the criminal law [ ... ] imprisonment should be resorted to only after the most anxious consideration.

Pius Langa

#78. The most innocent man's words will be used against him.

Kenneth Eade

#79. This is nothing new. We saw this with the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Right Act - constitutional challenges were brought to all three of these monumental pieces of legislation.

Stephanie Cutter

#80. There was not a member of the Constitutional Convention who had the least objection to what is contended for by the advocates for a Bill of Rights and trial by jury.

George Washington

#81. I don't support gay marriage, but I also don't support a constitutional amendment banning it. However, I do support same sex unions that would give gay couples all the rights, privileges and protections of marriage.

Bob Casey Jr.

#82. Our democracy depends on an informed citizenry to survive, Your Honor. Besides the advancement of truth, science and morality in general, the freedom of the press is a backbone of democracy. It exists to keep the government transparent, and the human instruments of government honest.

Kenneth Eade

#83. The First Amendment does not guarantee the press a constitutional right of special access to information not available to the general public, nor does it cloak the inmate with special rights of freedom of speech.

Pete Wilson

#84. The assassin's bullet: Lee Harvey Oswald created a constitutional space for decisive legislative action, opening a path for Lyndon Johnson to save the civil rights revolution at the cost of destroying the New Deal coalition.

Bruce A. Ackerman

#85. Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.

Cory Booker

#86. The next year, the Court decided what is generally viewed as the major case of the early years. The decision, Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), provoked an immediate backlash, in the form of the first constitutional amendment to be ratified after the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights.

Linda Greenhouse

#87. Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102)

Cornel West