Top 100 Quotes About The Bill Of Rights
#1. I suspect that the framers of the Bill of Rights have long since rolled over in their graves.
Jay Parini
#2. To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
Gore Vidal
#3. 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
#4. I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.
George Will
#5. America was founded to be a beacon of liberty, particularly religious liberty. The framers of our Constitution sought to preserve religious liberty to such an extent that they made it the first right protected in the Bill of Rights.
Edwin Meese
#6. The immune system, the hypothalamus, the ventro-medial frontal cortices, and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause.
Antonio R. Damasio
#7. The right to be a journalist is part of the Bill of Rights.
John C. Dvorak
#8. I revere the Bill of Rights, but at the same time I believe that anyone who's using three or more of them at a time is hogging them too much. (152)
Sarah Vowell
#9. The Bill of Rights should contain the general principles of natural and civil liberty. It should be to a community what the eternal laws and obligations of morality are to the conscience. It should be unalterable by any human power ...
Thomas Paine
#10. The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans.
William J. Brennan
#11. I have little patience with people who take the Bill of Rights for granted. The Bill of Rights, contained in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, is every American's guarantee of freedom.
Harry S. Truman
#12. We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights-older than our political parties, older than our school system.
William O. Douglas
#13. From my admittedly cranky perspective, Bush/Cheney are lousy on the Bill of Rights, Clinton/Gore were lousy on the Bill of Rights, and everyone within bribing distance of the 2008 election (Hillary, McCain, Giuliani) are lousy on the Bill of Rights, too.
Matt Welch
#14. This has been the new normal since September 11. Everyone knows, but nobody says, that if something happens again, the elite consensus in this country, and the overwhelming consensus of the citizenry, will be to pitch the Bill of Rights out the window and start rounding folks up.
Charlie Pierce
#15. Some politicians are aware of the Bill of Rights. It seems that the opposition party is far more likely to invoke it, to wave it in the air, this is what we saw from a lot of republicans during the Clinton Administration, and we are seeing the same from Democrats under Bush.
James Bovard
#16. The Bill of Rights existed long before President Obama was elected, and as long as I'm a U.S. Senator, I will fight to protect the basic rights and liberties that belong to all of us as American citizens.
Rand Paul
#17. The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.
Carl Sagan
#18. No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.
Edmund A. Opitz
#19. I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th century straitjacket, unsuited for this age ... The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today.
Hugo Black
#20. The strength of this country lies in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the freedom of speech and thought.
George Soros
#21. Religion is extremely important in this democracy - so important that it occupies a prime position in the Bill of Rights.
Mario Cuomo
#22. When the Bill of Rights was written, no one owned a MAG5100, 100-round magazine for an M-16. The concept of a mass slaughter carried out over a matter of minutes was incomprehensible.
Kurt Eichenwald
#23. If you believe in the values of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, if you're willing to work hard and play by the rules, you are part of our family. And we're proud to be with you.
William J. Clinton
#24. Some of the folks on both sides might be sincere, but it does seem as if it is only the opposition that cares about the Bill of Rights most of the time.
James Bovard
#25. The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
H.L. Mencken
#26. The American moron's mind simply does not run in that direction; he wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights
H.L. Mencken
#27. Without amendments we would never even have had the Bill of Rights.
Adrian Cronauer
#28. The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
Walter Lippmann
#29. Attorney General John Ashcroft is in intensive care. He's suffering from a severe case of pancreatitis, which they can't really figure out because he's not really a drinker. They think he might have picked up some type of infection while wiping his ass with the Bill of Rights.
Bill Maher
#30. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.
Robert H. Jackson
#31. 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
#32. [The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government.
Laurence Tribe
#33. People in this country need to understand when you go to any airport in the United States, you are not protected by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. They can do anything they want to you, and there is no where you can go to seek redress.
Jesse Ventura
#34. We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.
Felix Frankfurter
#35. Who needs the protection of the Bill of Rights most? The weak, the most vulnerable in society.
Danny Kaye
#36. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.
Smedley Butler
#37. Americans may not always live up to the Bill of Rights, but Americans do not ban books.
Bradley A. Smith
#38. The callous use of general warrants and the disregard for the Bill of Rights must end. Forcing us to choose between our rights and our safety is a false choice and we are better than that as a nation and as a people.
Rand Paul
#39. People have lost what this nation was built on. I think our core values have been set aside ... I believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.
Diane Hendricks
#40. I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation
Carl Sagan
#41. The very inclusion of the right to keep and bear arms in the Bill of Rights shows that the framers of the Constitution considered it an individual right.
Samuel Ray Cummings
#42. Our Founding Fathers drafted the Bill of Rights to ensure that We the People could determine how best to protect our communities.
Mike Quigley
#43. The Sherman Act is similar in the economics sphere to the Bill of Rights in the personal sphere.
Harold H. Greene
#44. I'm a firm believer in the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights. I don't think you should infringe on the type of weapon somebody should buy or the number of rounds in a high-capacity magazine.
Gabriel E. Gomez
#45. I cannot believe that Muffy just called the First Amendment fiddle-faddle. Fiddle Faddle is a delicious candy-coated popcorn snack food. It has nothing to do with the Bill of Rights.
Meg Cabot
#46. The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority ... It is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people.
Frank I. Cobb
#48. If gay Americans are not allowed to get married and have all the benefits that American citizens are entitled to by the Bill of Rights, they should get one hell of a tax break. That is my opinion.
Jeanne Phillips
#49. [I]t is true that [the provisions of the Bill of Rights] were designed to meet ancient evils. But they are the same kind of human evils that have emerged from century to century whenever excessive power is sought by the few at the expense of the many.
Hugo Black
#50. Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?
Alexander Hamilton
#51. If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.
Ilana Mercer
#52. The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.
H.L. Mencken
#53. The First Amendment freedom of religion is as important today as when the Bill of Rights was first written.
Arlen Specter
#54. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
Rachel Carson
#55. Jubal longed for the days when a lawyer could cite the Bill of Rights and not have some over-riding Federation trickery defeat him.
Robert A. Heinlein
#56. The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to 'create' rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
William J. Brennan Jr.
#57. The belief in potential human virtue underlies the whole idea of the Bill of Rights; the document is a very tough guardian of that belief.
Roger Rosenblatt
#58. 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
#59. Society teaches us that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The bill of rights informs us that we have the right to keep it to ourselves.
Brian Randleas
#60. So long as we govern our nation by the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, we can be sure that our nation will grow in strength and wisdom and freedom.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#61. The Second Amendment is an integral part of the Bill of Rights.
Ted Cruz
#62. 2. We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.
Winston S. Churchill
#63. Maintaining the balance of power should be as fundamental to American foreign policy as the Bill of Rights is to domestic policy.
George Friedman
#64. You in the media ought to be ashamed of yourselves to call the provisions and the guarantees of the Bill of Rights 'Technicalities'. They're not. We are what we are because of those guarantees.
William J. Brennan
#65. I think that you can't start to pick apart anything out of the Bill of Rights without thinking that it's all going to become undone, if you take one out or change one law, then why wouldn't they take all your rights away from you?
Bruce Willis
#66. Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee.
F. Lee Bailey
#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. It is doubtful that congress would pass the Bill of Rights if it were introduced today.
Earl Warren
#69. Nobody ever was fired for 9/11. Instead of firing the people who didn't do a good job, we gave them medals. The guy who did a good job, I don't know what happened to him. And what we did was we decided we'd just collect everybody's information. That we'd sort of scrap the Bill of Rights.
Rand Paul
#70. If you're patriotic, stand up for the Bill of Rights because once they strip your rights from you, you will pay hell to get them back. You will and we're in the process of it right now.
Jesse Ventura
#71. The Bill of Rights isn't about us, it's about them . It isn't a list of things we're permitted to do, it's a list of things they aren't allowed even to consider.
L. Neil Smith
#72. I do believe that it was through divine providence that the Founding Fathers drafted a document that created a government that didn't trust each other - hence the separation of powers. And then, to close the deal, the Bill of Rights was added to continue to protect individual rights and freedoms.
John Shimkus
#73. The Bill of Rights was intended to secure freedom of speech - the freedom of speech of members of parliament to speak freely rather than be at threat of ... the threat of an over powerful monarch at the time.
William Hague
#74. Contrary to all the blather we here about the unique goodness of the American people or our religious heritage or anything else, the one thing that set this country apart from all others was the Bill of Rights.
Harry Browne
#75. Join America taught English, an understanding of the U.S. Constitution, that the Bill of Rights is the ultimate insurance policy for a citizen, and that being a citizen is not an entitlement. And we also taught a bit of capitalism.
Niger Innis
#76. The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism.
Adlai Stevenson I
#77. The American Jews are liberal en masse because the 'Bill Of Rights' guarantees for them (through their evolutionist Justices) to keep the majority and their 'Democracy' in check.
Ibrahim Ibrahim
#78. The Bill of Rights isn't some legalistic fine print. It was written to make our lives freer, more prosperous, and happier. By forsaking it, America has become no better than any other country in the world.
Harry Browne
#79. The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?
Cory Doctorow
#80. As the interned American citizens of Japanese descent learned, the Bill of Rights provided them with little protection when it was needed.
Glenn Reynolds
#81. Are gun rights advocates arguing that roving gangs ... shooting innocent bystanders constitutes a 'well-regulated militia'?
Bill Hicks
#82. The very purpose of a bill of rights is to withdraw certain subjects from ... political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities.
Robert H. Jackson
#83. All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.
Ben Shahn
#84. The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.
Gore Vidal
#85. Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.
A.E. Samaan
#86. I hold it to be impracticable"4 to try to define it or any right narrowly in a Bill of Rights.
Thom Hartmann
#87. Terrorists and their allies believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Bill of Rights and every charter of liberty ever written are lies to be burned and destroyed and forgotten.
George W. Bush
#88. Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget.
Bill T. Jones
#89. Recommended additon to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights: "A right to not have your data rise up and attack you."
Benjamin Wittes
#90. Arlen Specter is the man who voted in favor of Bill Clinton during impeachment, voted against Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, voted against school choice for the District of Columbia, endorses an absolutist interpretation of abortion rights. He is bright and he is tough and he belongs elsewhere.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#91. By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.
Bill Cosby
#92. No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.
Daphne Merkin
#93. Left wing, whacko groups like animal rights activists and right-to-lifers were easy targets for my humor. I enjoyed poking fun at these closed-minded groups.
Bill Bernico
#94. There are only two reasons why you should ever be asked to give your youngsters. One is defense of our homes. The other is the defense of our Bill of Rights and particularly the right to worship God as we see fit. Every other reason advanced for the murder of young men is a racket, pure and simple.
Smedley D. Butler
#95. The next time you get the urge to shut somebody up because they don't see the world exactly the same way you do, take a deep breath, get out your Bill of Rights, and count to the ten amendments.
Dennis Miller
#96. The nation's government has just handed me the bill that grants us our civil rights. I am receiving it before you, certain that I am accepting this on behalf of all Argentinean women, and I can feel my hands tremble with joy as they grasp the laurel proclaiming victory.
Evita Peron
#97. Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.
A.E. Samaan
#98. You have to remember, rights don't come in groups we shouldn't have 'gay rights'; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn't have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group.
Ron Paul
#99. There are two amendments only which I am anxious for: 1. A bill of rights, which it is so much the interest of all to have that I conceive it must be yielded ... 2. The restoring of the principle of necessary rotation, particularly to the Senate and Presidency, but most of all to the last ...
Thomas Jefferson
#100. A hastily written "Civil Rights Act" was rushed through Congress. President Andrew Johnson immediately vetoed it, noting that the right to confer citizenship rested with the several states, and that "the tendency of the bill is to resuscitate the spirit of rebellion".
Eustace Mullins
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