United States Constitution Quotes

#1. The principles of the United States Constitution are, because of Senator Byrd, still the heartbeat of the US Senate.

David C. Hardesty Jr.

#2. While the framers of the United States Constitution were ashamed of slavery and used euphemisms in place of the term "slave", the authors of the Confederate Constitution proudly used the term no less than ten times.

C.L. Gammon

#3. It's time to recognize that under the equal protection clause of the United States [Constitution], same-sex couples should have the same rights as anybody else.

Barack Obama

#4. As Members of Congress, we swear an oath to uphold the United States Constitution. It means something to be an American because we believe in our country, we believe in our people, and we believe in our constitution.

Todd Tiahrt

#5. I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.

L. Neil Smith

#6. I freely acknowledge myself the servant of the people, according to the bond of service - the United States Constitution; and that, as such, I am responsible to them.

Abraham Lincoln

#7. In the absence of a limitation on local enforcement powers, the states are bound by the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution to enforce violations of the federal immigration laws.

Russell Pearce

#8. Under the United States Constitution, the federal government has no authority to hold states "accountable" for their education performance ... In the free society envisioned by the founders, schools are held accountable to parents, not federal bureaucrats.

Ron Paul

#9. The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#10. The United States Constitution is clear. It prohibits religious tests for public office.

Jeb Bush

#11. I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#12. Every American deserves their day in court. Every American is innocent until proven guilty. These are core values enshrined in our founding document - the United States Constitution.

John Garamendi

#13. The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.

Bruce Catton

#14. Of the judicial department of the Government, the Supreme Court is the head and representative, and to it must come for final decision all the great legal questions which may arise under the Constitution, the laws, or the treaties of the United States.

Samuel Freeman Miller

#15. Next to be in one with worshiping God, there is nothing in this world upon which this church should be more united than in upholding and defending the constitution of the United States.

David O. McKay

#16. I do believe that, under the law, under the Constitution of the United States, and under our public policy, that women deserve and should have a right to enjoy equal employment opportunity.

Gloria Allred

#17. The number of individuals employed under the Constitution of the United States will be much smaller than the number employed under the particular States.

James Madison

#18. One stands, in fact, in awe of the Constitution of the United States, though it is an idea and not quite a reality.

Nikki Giovanni

#19. You give me a credit to which I have no claim in calling me "the writer of the Constitution of the United States." This was not, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, the offspring of a single brain. It ought to be regarded as the work of many heads and many hands.

James Madison

#20. Woodrow Wilson later wrote: "The Constitution of the United States has been made under the dominion of the Newtonian theory.

Andrew Thomas

#21. The fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand and property owners on the other.

Charles A. Beard

#22. Next to upholding the Constitution of the United States, the president's highest duty is to protect the security of this country - our national security.

Wesley Clark

#23. I just want people who are qualified, I want them to believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. So yep, I don't have a problem with appointing an openly gay person. Because they're not going to try to put sharia law in our laws.

Herman Cain

#24. The Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.

John McCain

#25. Therefore every person born within the United States, its territories or districts, whether the parents are citizens or aliens, is a natural born citizen in the sense of the Constitution, and entitled to all the rights and privileges appertaining to that capacity.

William Rawle

#26. How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Christopher Hitchens

#27. They will sustain the constitution and laws and institutions of the United States, and be the champions of liberty and of that constitution when its integrity shall be threatened.

Lorenzo Snow

#28. Our laws are like the software that runs our country. All the laws for a country, together, are called its legal code, just like computer software is written using code.

Liz Long

#29. The freedom to bear arms may be righteously rejected to encourage the preservation of all corporeal forms of life.

Kevin Alan Lee

#30. As members of Congress, we take an oath to uphold the Constitution and bear true faith and allegiance to the United States, not the Republican or Democratic party. I have been willing to stand up to my own leadership when it's in the national interest.

Jackie Speier

#31. The United States is truly remarkable, a nation founded on a set of Enlightenment ideals so beautifully expressed by the Declaration of Independence and codified in the U.S. Constitution. We should feel good about our ideals, even when we don't quite manage to live up to them.

Jay Parini

#32. Every Latter-day Saint should love the inspired Constitution of the United States - a nation with a spiritual foundation and a prophetic history - which nation the Lord has declared to be his base of operations in these latter days.

Ezra Taft Benson

#33. In 1905, the Supreme Court of the United States applied the rule to the country's founding document: The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted it means now.

Antonin Scalia

#34. The construction applied ... to those parts of the Constitution of the United States which delegate Congress a power ... ought not to be construed as themselves to give unlimited powers, nor a part to be so taken as to destroy the whole residue of that instrument.

Thomas Jefferson

#35. The principle of free speech is no new doctrine born of the Constitution of the United States. It is a heritage of English-speaking peoples, which has been won by incalculable sacrifice, and which they must preserve so long as they hope to live as free men.

Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

#36. 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

#37. The framers were realists; they recognized that the best constitution in the world could be distorted and destroyed by men determined to do so.

John Eidsmoe

#38. When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I had no such purpose, but that were I to do it by mistake I should be inexpressibly contrite.

Peter Medawar

#39. The civil rights movement is understanding your freedom under the Constitution of these United States and if anyone tries to take those freedoms from you, you better rise up and fight and that's what we're doing together.

Ken Hutcherson

#40. I am saying to you that to me the Constitution of the United States is just as much from my Heavenly Father as the Ten Commandments

George Albert Smith

#41. If children do not understand the Constitution, they cannot understand how our government functions, or what their rights and responsibilities are as citizens of the United States.

John Roberts

#42. Well, first of all, I don't want to debate the word conservative, but by my definition, a conservative is someone who wants to conserve the Constitution of the United States and the American tradition and law that no one is above the law.

Dan Rather

#43. I believe that the United States government was set up with the help of God, and it is the closest government in the world to how God would have men govern themselves.

Gary Hansen

#44. Of the powers conferred upon the General Government by the Constitution of the United States much the most important are those given to the legislative body.

Samuel Freeman Miller

#45. Religious freedom is already protected in the United States. It's in our Constitution. It's in most state constitutions.

Dannel Malloy

#46. It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people's liberties that is in jeopardy. That is why I wrote 'Losing America.'

Robert Byrd

#47. The Constitution grants only Congress - not the president - the power 'to borrow money on the credit of the United States.'

Laurence Tribe

#48. It is my privilege to have introduced House Resolution 1612 honoring the Constitution of the United States, and the freedoms and rights it has given to every American.

Bob Latta

#49. The real difference between the United States and other nations lies not in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, but in the fact that the substantive clauses of that Constitution are enforced by individuals independent of and not beholden to the elected branches.

Harold H. Greene

#50. The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

Thomas Jefferson

#51. I feel that I'm sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Alabama, and those constitutions are founded upon a fundamental belief in God ... my display of the Ten Commandments and prayer before sessions are simply acknowledgments of God.

Roy Moore

#52. What I don't like is judges legislating from the bench. And as president of the United States, I will appoint justices who uphold the Constitution and who don't see themselves as a super legislature.

Michele Bachmann

#53. 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

#54. President David O. McKay declared: "No greater immediate responsibility rests upon members of the Church, upon all citizens of this Republic and of neighboring Republics than to protect the freedom vouchsafed by the Constitution of the United States." (Conference Report, April 1950, p. 37.)

Ezra Taft Benson

#55. The Constitution was framed in order to form a more perfect union, not to establish mass confusion.

Byron Goines

#56. Without the three-fifths rule, there wouldn't have been a Constitution of the United States - not one that governed the American South, at any rate - because the South wouldn't have ratified it.

Timothy Noah

#57. It is preposterous that the current members of the United States Senate and all of their predecessors for more than 200 years haven't been able to read the Constitution and do what it says.

John Jay Hooker

#58. It was one of the compromises of the Constitution that the slave property in the Southern States should be recognized as property throughout the United States.

Jefferson Davis

#59. In the United States we have, in effect, two governments ... We have the duly constituted Government ... Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution.

Wright Patman

#60. I reverence the Constitution of the United States as a sacred document. To me its words are akin to the revelations of God, for God has placed his stamp of approval on the Constitution of this land.

Ezra Taft Benson

#61. No one supposes that the government of the United States is supreme, beyond the sphere plainly defined by the constitution: Neither does any one deny that the State is supreme within its proper sphere of action.

James L. Petigru

#62. To their duty to God, youth should realize their duty to our country. They should love and honor the Constitution of the United States, the basic concepts and principles upon which this nation has been established. Yes, they need to develop a love for our free institutions.

Ezra Taft Benson

#63. This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.

James Madison

#64. No one familiar with the common law of England can read the Constitution of the United States without observing the great desire of the Convention which framed that instrument to make it conform as far as possible with that law.

Samuel Freeman Miller

#65. Every human being born within the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.

John Bingham

#66. Every presidential candidate highlights patriotism, but Mr. Romney's is backed by the Mormon belief that the United States was chosen by God to play a special role in history, its Constitution divinely inspired.

Jodi Kantor

#67. The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.

Thomas Jefferson

#68. Yeah, it's legal in the United States. It's part of our Constitution. You know, the right to bear arms is because that's the last form of defense against tyranny. Not to hunt. It's to protect yourself from the police.

Ice-T

#69. 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

#70. Throughout the ages advanced souls have yearned for a society in which liberty and justice prevail. Men have sought for it, fought for it, have died for it. Ancient freemen prized it; slaves longed for it; the Magna Charta demanded it; the Constitution of the United States declared it.

David O. McKay

#71. The particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.

John Marshall

#72. The two most important documents affecting the destiny of America are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Both these immortal papers relate primarily to the freedom of the individual.

David O. McKay

#73. [An] act of the Congress of the United States ... which assumes powers ... not delegated by the Constitution, is not law, but is altogether void and of no force.

Thomas Jefferson

#74. The constitution shall never be construed ... to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.

Alexander Hamilton

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

A.E. Samaan

#76. Those who created the structure of the Episcopal Church were, in many cases, the same individuals who had framed and adopted the Constitution of the United States only a few years earlier, so it is not surprising that our structure is very similar.

John H. Westerhoff III

#77. We are hated because we are free. We are hated because of the idea that is the United States of America. We are hated because of our Constitution.

Rush Limbaugh

#78. The United States supports the reintegration of people who have fought with the Taliban into Afghan society provided they: one, renounce al Qaeda, two, lay down their arms and renounce violence, and three, participate in the public political life of the country in accordance with the constitution.

Richard Holbrooke

#79. We have a tremendous lack of knowledge of how far we have gotten away from the Constitution of the United States. Democrats and Republicans alike have taken us away from the original intent. You see, I believe in this document as our founding fathers intended it.

Paul Broun

#80. Do you know we have more acreage of forest land in the United States today than we did at the time the Constitution was written.

Rush Limbaugh

#81. A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.

Jill Lepore

#82. Roughly speaking, the President of the United States knows what his job is. Constitution and custom spell it out, for him as well as for us. His wife has no such luck. The First Lady has no rules; rather each new woman must make her own.

Shana Alexander

#83. Custody and guardianship by the parent of his child does not arise under the Constitution, laws or treaties of the United States and is not dependent on them.

Samuel Freeman Miller

#84. At no time, at no place in solemn convention assembled, through no chosen agents, had the American people officially proclaimed the United States to be a democracy. The Constitution did not contain the word or any word lending countenance to it ...

Charles A. Beard

#85. Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.

James Madison

#86. The Constitution of this government was written by men who accepted Jesus Christ as the Savior of mankind. Let men and women in these United States then continue to keep their eyes centered upon Him who ever shines as a Light to all the world.

David O. McKay

#87. Governor Ford is sworn to support the Constitution of the United States and also of this State Illinois, and these constitutions guarantee religious as well as civil liberty to all religious societies whatever.

Joseph Smith Jr.

#88. It is perfectly clear, in the first place, that the constitution of the United States did not, of itself, create or establish slavery as a new institution; or even give any authority to the state governments to establish it as a new institution. The greatest sticklers for slavery do not claim this.

Lysander Spooner

#89. I arose and spoke substantially as follows: ... I love the government and the constitution of the United States, but I do not love the damned rascals who administer the government.

Brigham Young

#90. We have investigative staff who are charged by law and this committee under the Constitution of the United States has a responsibility, taxpayers' money, and an agency which we fund from the government, they bought weapons, we believe and we think that - I don't know who did what.

John Mica

#91. [I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.

John Updike

#92. 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

#93. No power over the freedom of religion [is] delegated to the United States by the Constitution.

James Madison

#94. Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean.

William H. Seward

#95. I hope that you have re-read the Constitution of the United States in these past few weeks. Like the Bible, it ought to be read again and again.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#96. President is a curious term for the American head of state, because "presiding" in any meaningful sense is the one thing the president of the United States does not do.

Garrett Epps

#97. If the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.

Tommy Franks

#98. It was settled by the Constitution, the laws, and the whole practice of the government that the entire executive power is vested in the President of the United States.

Andrew Jackson

#99. In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#100. As the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial departments of the United States are co-ordinate, and each equally bound to support the Constitution, it follows that each must in the exercise of its functions be guided by the text of the Constitution according to its own interpretation of it.

James Madison