Constitutional Rights Quotes

“If you both own a gun and a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”
― levitt, steven, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Nowhere in the Bill of Rights are the words "unless inconvenient" to be found.”
― A.E. Samaan

“[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do–that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing.

Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens–especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints–are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views.”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government Of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“Liberty is not something a government gives you. It is a right that no government can legally take away.”
― A.E. Samaan

“The right to self defense is inalienable from the right to life. Weaken one and the other is devalued. Surrender your arms today and forfeit your life tomorrow.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Our democracy depends on an informed citizenry to survive, Your Honor. Besides the advancement of truth, science and morality in general, the freedom of the press is a backbone of democracy. It exists to keep the government transparent, and the human instruments of government honest.”
― Kenneth Eade, The Spy Files

“History could not be any clearer: Rights given by fad and fashion are just as easily taken away. The Constitution matters.”
― A.E. Samaan

“A constitution is not a thing in name only, but in fact. It has not an ideal, but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in a visible form, there is none. A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting the government. It is the body of elements, to which you can refer, and quote article by article; and which contains the principles on which the government shall be established, the manner in which it shall be organized, the powers it shall have, the mode of elections, the duration of Parliaments, or by what other name such bodies may be called; the powers which the executive part of the government shall have; and in fine, everything that relates to the complete organisation of a civil government, and the principles which it shall act, and by which it shall be bound. A constitution, therefore, is to a government what the laws made afterwards by that government are to a court of judicature. The court of judicature does not make the laws, neither can it alter them; it only acts in conformity to the laws made: and the government is in like manner governed by the constitution.”
― Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

“Which parts of the Bill of Rights are you willing to surrender just so you can virtue signal your willingness to compromise... to find a middle ground... to be middle of the road?”
― A.E. Samaan

“…voting is important not because the right to vote appears in the Constitution (it doesn’t), but because voting preserves all other constitutional rights. It’s the linchpin for everything else. … One important check on government abuses of power, in addition to lawsuits, is through voting. Otherwise, government officials become above the law and their bad behavior won’t stop.”
― Kim Wehle, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why

“Attempting to resolve questions of interpretation by deferring to the intentions of the Framers of the Constitution leads to several practical and philosophical difficulties. First, the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, was not written by one person but was arrived at through a process of debate, politicking, and compromise. It may be that the various participants in that process had different intentions about what the amendment should mean and how it should be implemented; those intentions may even have been contradictory. Moreover, some would argue that even if the Constitution had one author with one coherent intention as to its meaning and future implementation, that intention could never be completely accessible to judges, or even historians, two centuries later. Finally, assuming for the sake of argument that the Constitutions; Framers did have a unitary, discoverable intention as to how it should be implemented in a particular case, it is not clear that that intention should necessarily govern constitutional interpretation in the late twentieth century, a profoundly different time and society from that of the Framers. The Constitution endures because it is a vehicle for the most central values of American society; but those values necessarily evolve as society changes.”
― Morton J. Horwitz

“Freedom of conscience means not only the freedom to believe but also the freedom to change - not only the right to practice one faith but also the right to a spiritual journey. The Founders didn't just champion religious freedom - they used it. Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison never stopped examining - passionately, combatively, wisely - life's deepest questions. Each journey was distinctive, but they ended up in similar places, still deeply spiritual but with an ever-shortening list of required religious creeds. The older they got, the simpler their faith became.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“Our Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a court of conjecture and political fad.”
― A.E. Samaan

“To be an American is to be accosted by bigotry and enmity for the rights that you were told to appreciate.”
― Tennessee West

“The law is well alive. If one cuts it, it will bleed. Consequently, my only lingering concern is to determine its apposite transgressor regardless of his status. The slightest failure to aggressively do so would make the law a façade of my commitment to see a society free of any discrimination.” Attorney Jerry Boies.”
― Jerry Boies

“The 2nd Amendment exists for the same reason "Madame la Guillotine" existed; to cut off the head of a corrupt governing class.”
― A.E. Samaan

“The Americans invented the 2nd Amendment.
The French invented the "le madame guillotine".
Neither was invented for hunting.”
― A.E. Samaan

“VIRGINIA 1/20/2020:

The right to self defense is inalienable from the right to life. Weaken one and the other is devalued. Surrender your arms today and forfeit your life tomorrow.

It is by no coincidence that a morally bankrupt man is behind the violation of the 2nd Amendment in the State of Virginia: Governor Northam, a man otherwise known for his support for after birth abortion and the wearing of "black face." someone with a defective moral compass, who does not know the sanctity of life, can't very well be expected to know the value of defending it.”
― A.E. Samaan

“To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it, either to state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a "private" business.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“The most emerging religion in India is “Religion of News agency”, Though the reality is most of them are driven by asinine deliberative political rhetoric. So, your allegiance towards the nation cannot be impelled by these news outlets, it has to be with living and breathing document “The Constitution of India”
― Ramkrishan Guru

“What is citizen within a social contract where our Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial can be suspended in the event of our completely legal (but extrajudicial) murder by police?”
― Zoé Samudzi, As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation

“The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects and to prevent any national ecclesiastical patronage of the national government.”
― Joseph Story

“Few men or women in our lifetimes have been so unjustly vilified in the popular media as the late Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court. If you are not a lawyer who read his opinions, if you know nothing about Justice Scalia other than what you have read in the popular press, you have surely been deceived into believing that this man was some sort of archconservative who could regularly be counted upon to side with the government and trample the constitutional liberties of the poor and the powerless. The truth is much more complicated than that. While Justice Scalia was, by his own admission, exceptionally stingy in refusing to accept arguments about constitutional rights that involved some aspect of general "liberty" that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution—rights like abortion, or same-sex marriage—when it came to the defense of constitutional liberties that are explicitly described in the Constitution, no other recent member of the Supreme Court was so uncompromisingly passionate and liberal in refusing to water down those protections.”
― James Duane, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens.”
― Wendell Lewis Willkie, An American Program

“Any every denomination of Christians, demeaning themselves peaceably, and as good subjects of the commonwealth, shall be equally under the protection of the law: and no subordination of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law. Massachusetts Constitution.”
― Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Published in Conformity to a Resolve of the Legislature of April 26, 1853

“The constitutional right of today may be a violation of human rights tomorrow, hence, no constitution, and in fact, no text is to be taken as gospel… they must be scrutinized by each new generation and if found incompatible with the new society, must be either amended or discarded altogether.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Solo Standing on Guard: Life Before Law

“If you treat the constitution the same way fundamentalists treat the bible, you are going to have a very sick society on your hands.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Solo Standing on Guard: Life Before Law

“Independent thinking is a crucial precursor to political independence.”
― A.E. Samaan

“I will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. It is not the Constitution as I would like to have it, but as it is, that is to be defended... It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced and defended, and let the grass grow where it may.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Both my mother and father had to go into my elementary school and argue with the principal on my behalf in order to protect my rights, multiple times.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future