"We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."

John Adams, Source: Oct. 11, 1798; Address to the military

"...(A)rguing that the words of the Constitution have no fixed meaning is tantamount to arguing that we have no Constitution; a Constitution serves no purpose if the branches of government it is supposed to limit can define their own powers."

W. James Antle III

"How can those who are invested with the power of government be prevented from the abuse of those powers as the means of aggrandizing themselves? ... Without a strong constitution to counteract the strong tendency of government to disorder and abuse there can be little progress or improvement."

John C. Calhoun, cited in The South was Right!, James & Walter Kennedy, 1991, p. 150

"To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ..."

John C. Calhoun

"I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."

President Grover Cleveland

"Since Vice President Al Gore is constantly making things up, it should come as no surprise that he wants Supreme Court justices who will do the same. As Gore put it, he will appoint judges who view the Constitution as a 'document that grows'."

Ann Coulter

"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."

William O. Douglas

"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

"America's greatness is due in no small measure to our system of government, in which power and authority are deliberately divided. The separation of powers is not a mere "technicality." It is the centerpiece of our Constitution. Our freedoms depend upon it in the future, just as they have in the past."

Richard Epstein, "The Problem With Presidential Signing Statements" [July 18, 2006]
"A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it."

Sen. Sam Ervin

"...[O]ur Founding Fathers enshrined a constitutional separation of powers for the ages undeluded by the fantasy that angels would win elections."

Bruce Fein

"....I am sure that the dangers of this system (the Federal Constitution) are real, when those who have no similar interest with the people of this country (the South) are to legislate for us - when our dearest rights are to be left, in the hands of those, whose advantage it will be to infringe them."

Patrick Henry

"Such a government is incompatible with the genius of republicanism. There will be no checks, no real balances, in this government. What can avail your specious, imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances?...It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad? Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt."

Patrick Henry, speaking against the adoption of the Constitution, Virginia Convention, June 5, 1788

"What right do they have to say "we the people" rather than we the States?"

Patrick Henry, cited in The Anti-Federalist, H. Storing, ed. (University of Chicago, 1985) p. 297

"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government."

Patrick Henry

"In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

Thomas Jefferson

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents...."

James Madison

"The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature."

James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson

"In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not the executive department. ... The trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man."

James Madison
"The peculiar circumstances of the moment may render a measure more or less wise, but cannot render it more or less constitutional."

John Marshall

"A legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law."

John Marshall

"To those who cite the First Amendment as reason for excluding God from more and more of our institutions everyday; I say: The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny."

Ronald Reagan
"Make sure the government treats others the same as you would want the government to treat you. ...Once you consent to the government ignoring the Constitution, you deny yourself the protection of the Constitution."

Charley Reese

"The poor Constitution itself is hardly paid any attention to. It's necessary to ignore it because most of what government does these days is clearly unconstitutional. The original idea, as expressed by James Madison, was that states would do 95 percent of the governing. Today, they are little more than administrative subdivisions of the central empire."

Charley Reese

"Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all.  How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?"

Paul Craig Roberts

"Unequal group rights, the politics of redistribution and a Constitution whose meaning varies with changeable coalitions are a recipe for civil war."

Paul Craig Roberts in the Washington Times, August 3, 2000 page A20

"To be a Christian patriot ... requires us to be critical of acts done by the United States that are illegal in terms of the Constitution or unjust or immoral in terms of the higher law of God. A Christian patriot is one who is faithful to his country in terms of a prior faithfulness to God. Christians ought to be both the most vocal supporters of the ideals that made America great and the most outspoken critics of its failures. Party loyalty often pulls us down in this regard. The activities of our government must not be judged in terms of their political expediency but in terms of their moral legitimacy."

Mark R. Rushdoony, 'The Critical Patriot'
"How odd that Americans, and not just their presidents, have come to think of their Constitution as something separable from the government it's supposed to constitute.  In theory, it should be as binding on rulers as the laws of physics are on engineers who design bridges; in practice, its axioms have become mere options. Of course engineers don't have to take oaths to respect the law of gravity; reality gives them no choice.  Politics, as we see, makes all human laws optional for politicians."

Joseph Sobran

"Altering the Constitution has become the daily business of the Federal Government which the document is supposed to guide and limit. Both Congress and the judiciary assume, and exercise, countless powers they aren't entitled to."

Joseph Sobran

"Now whatever you think of the liberal agenda on its merits, until very recently nobody thought the Constitution meant what liberals now say it means."

Joseph Sobran

"The Constitution didn't 'grow'; it was never supposed to. Written law must be stable, or it isn't law. A government that can change the very meaning of old words is tyrannical. What really happened -- fairly recently, in historical terms -- is that the courts were taken over by liberal zealots who saw the judiciary as a potential instrument of raw power. After all, justices are appointed for life; they don't face the people at the polls and can t be held responsible for the consequences of their rulings. So by disguising their desires as constitutional mandates, the courts have been able to impose their will on the whole country, uninhibited by reason, tradition, or any other force."

Joseph Sobran

"The most successful revolutions aren't those that are celebrated with parades and banners, drums and trumpets, cannons and fireworks. The really successful revolutions are those that occur quietly, unnoticed, uncommemorated. We don't celebrate the day the United States Constitution was destroyed; it didn't happen on a specific date, and most Americans still don't realize it happened at all. We don't say the Constitution has ceased to exist; we merely say that it's a 'living document.' But it amounts to the same thing."

Joseph Sobran

"Some people don't mind a little constitutional sophistry in a good cause; and for liberals, centralizing all power in the federal government is always a good cause. Since most Americans don't know or care what the Constitution says, let alone what their ancestors thought it meant, the great liberal snow job has been very successful."

Joseph Sobran

"Can the real Constitution be restored? Probably not. Too many Americans depend on government money under programs the Constitution doesn't authorize, and money talks with an eloquence Shakespeare could only envy. Ignorant people don't understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them."

Joseph Sobran

"...[T]he Constitution conferred only a few specific powers on the federal government, all others being denied to it (as the Tenth Amendment would make plain). Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population today -- subtle logicians like you -- can grasp such nuances. Too bad. The Constitution wasn't meant to be a brain-twister."

Joseph Sobran

"Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like."

Joseph Sobran

"The liberal understanding of 'the separation of church and state' means that as the area of politics expands, the area of private freedom -- religious and otherwise -- shrinks."

Joseph Sobran

"...[T]oday's Washington is about as attentive to the Tenth Amendment as the Unitarian Church is to the Book of Revelation."

Joseph Sobran 

"Those who wrote the Constitution clearly understood that power is dangerous and needs to 
be limited by being separated -- separated not only into the three branches of the 
national government but also separated as between the whole national government, on the 
one hand, and the states and the people on the other."

Thomas Sowell

"Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what 
judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an 'extremist.' That person will be 
said to be 'out of the mainstream.' But the mainstream is itself the problem."

Thomas Sowell
"No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any [constitutional] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government."

 Roger B. Taney (1777-1864), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
 
"[L]et there be no change [in Constitutional powers] by usurpation; for though this, in 
one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free 
governments are destroyed."

George Washington
"Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world."

Daniel Webster

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."

Daniel Webster

"In 1907 Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes remarked that 'the Constitution is what the judges say it is'. Thus, in Hughes's view, law is arbitrary and is shaped by what a majority of nine Supreme Court justices say it is. Such an attitude is not that far removed from the 1936 decree of the Third Reich Commissar of Justice: A decision of the Fuhrer in the express form of a law or decree may not be scrutinized by a judge. In addition, the judge is bound by any other decisions of the Fuhrer, provided that they are clearly intended to declare law."

John W. Whitehead, The Second American Revolution, p. 20

"The First Amendment...begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'."

George Will

Return to Topical Index
Home