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Tag Name "Constitutions" (72)

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Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny, Paul said. They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.
Frank Herbert
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Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority.
William Howard Taft
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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
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Constitutions have to be written on hearts, not just paper.
Margaret Thatcher
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The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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By the time [John Adams] came to write his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States in 1787 he had as dark a view of the American character as that of any critic in our history.
Gordon S. Wood
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Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods.
Thomas Carlyle
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[John] Adams said his objective in writing his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States and his Davila essays was to counter what he thought was the unfair criticism of the American state constitutions made by the French philosophers, especially [Anne Robert Jacques] Turgot.
Gordon S. Wood
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Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.
Thomas Jefferson
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There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions one is a continual tendency towards politics the other is family pride and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
Henry Adams
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Charles Beard warned us that governments-inc luding the government of the United States-are not neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their Constitutions are intended to serve these interests.
Howard Zinn
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Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.
Abraham Lincoln
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It will be remembered, that a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is solemnly enjoined by most of the state constitutions, and particularly by our own, as a necessary safeguard against the danger of degeneracy, to which republics are liable, as well as other governments, though in a less degree than others.
James Madison
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Allow a government to decline paying its debts and you overthrow all public morality-you unhinge all the principles that preserve the limits of free constitutions. Nothing can more affect national prosperity than a constant and systematic attention to extinguish the present debt and to avoid as much as possibly the incurring of any new debt.
Alexander Hamilton
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The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed Man is more than Constitutions better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God.
James Russell Lowell
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The nicest constitutions of government are often like the finest pieces of clock-work, which, depending on so many motions, are therefore more subject to be out of order.
Alexander Pope
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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
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It is clear that those constitutions which aim at the common good are right, as being in accord with absolute justice while those which aim only at the good of the rulers are wrong.
Aristotle
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The idea that the object of constitutions is not to confirm the predominance of any interest, but to prevent it to preserve with equal care the independence of labour and the security of property to make the rich safe against envy, and the poor against oppression, marks the highest level attained by the statesmanship of Greece.
Lord Acton
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Any change of government which has to be introduced should be one which men, starting from their existing constitutions, will be both willing and able to adopt, since there is quite as much trouble in the reformation of an old constitution as in the establishment of a new one, just as to unlearn is as hard as to learn.
Aristotle
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We may form free constitutions, but our vices will destroy them we may enact laws, but they will not protect us.
Lyman Beecher
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I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don't contract them.
Barack Obama
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The Emancipation Proclamation is predicated upon the idea that the President may so annul the constitutions and laws of sovereign states, overthrow their domestic relations, deprive loyal men of their property, and disloyal as well, without trial or condemnation.
Melville Fuller
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Nothing in the constitutions of Western states requires them to get involved in every foreign conflict.
Daniel Pipes
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