Constitution Quotes

Constitutional democracy, you see, is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us.

Bill Moyers

However good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad. However bad a Constitution may be, if those implementing it are good, it will prove to be good.

B. R. Ambedkar

The greatest threat to our Constitution is our own ignorance of it.

Jacob F. Roecker

The dead should not rule the living

Thomas Jefferson

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none.

Joseph De Maistre

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

George Bernard Shaw

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.

Lyndon B. Johnson

The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

Walter Lippmann

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

Alexander Hamilton

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Benjamin Franklin

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

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The proposed Constitution is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both.

James Madison

Our constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws, not of men.

Gerald R. Ford

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Henry Kissinger

There is a higher law than the Constitution.

William Seward

A Constitution should be short and obscure.

Napoleon Bonaparte

The words of the Constitution are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.

Felix Frankfurter