The U.S. Constitution doesn’t guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.
Constitution Quotes
But the provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal.
Most faults are not in our Constitution, but in ourselves.
We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government and examined the different forms of those republics which, having been formed with seeds of their own dissolution, now no longer exist. And […]
If the thing has been practiced for two hundred years by common consent, it will need a strong case for the Fourteenth Amendment to affect it.
The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.
The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.
The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.
He who takes the oath today to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States only assumes the solemn obligation which every patriotic citizen – on the farm, in the workshop, in the busy marts of trade, and everywhere – should share with him.
As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has processes from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.
