#constitution

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of Constitutional power. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#education #government #liberty #politics #education

It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#constitution #liberty #morality #usa #values

[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

#free-speech #politics #united-states #united-states-constitution #war

A freedom given up is not so easily regained. ↗

— Rivera Sun

#civil-liberty #civil-rights-movement #constitution #constitutional-rights #freedom

If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane. ↗

— Henry Billings Brown

#constitution #inferior #other #plane #put

It's not written in the Constitution or anything else.... Congress, just out of the clear blue sky, said the airwaves belong to the people, which means, in essence, that it belongs to Congress. ↗

— Adrian Cronauer

#anything #belong #belongs #blue #blue sky

Many seventh graders I know in Illinois, as well as around the Nation, are studying the Constitution. I was pretty impressed with the quality of education our children are receiving because they had not expected me to ask them about it. ↗

— Melissa Bean

#around #ask #because #children #constitution

The fact that the church is convinced of not having the right to confer priestly ordination on women is now considered by some as irreconcilable with the European Constitution. ↗

— Pope Benedict XVI

#confer #considered #constitution #convinced #european

In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge. ↗

— Robert Bork

#content #democracy #given #judge #law

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere. ↗

— Robert Bork

#ask #constitution #endorsed #ideas #judges