We the People Quotes

“A constitutional convention of eminent citizens is the substitute for the armed mob of other countries.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“Scalia did not believe that a woman’s right to decide whether to end a pregnancy, even were her life in danger, was one of them.135 Unlike the right to bear arms.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“On the left, abortion would come to mean freedom and guns to mean murder, and, on the right, guns came to mean freedom and abortion to mean murder.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“The politicization of guns did not begin until the 1970s, when guns became a weapon in party realignment and in the fight over the federal judiciary.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“The history of originalism as advanced by Scalia has everything to do with abortion, and everything else to do with guns.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“Originalism did not arise from a belief that amendment was the only democratic way to change the Constitution. It arose from the failure of conservatives to change the Constitution by democratic means.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“The doctrine of original intent, Scalia concluded, just needed a better name; he proposed “the doctrine of original meaning.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“They looked to a whip-smart Catholic judge from Queens.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“Nixon campaign’s effort to woo alienated Democrats. “The people who are alienated are the ones who don’t want pot, who don’t want abortion, who don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes,”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“Easily forgotten in the storm that followed the Court’s decision in Roe is just how widespread was support for abortion in 1972, and how little that support divided along any partisan or religious lines;”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“Liberal intellectuals from Louis Hartz to Richard Hofstadter dismissed the far right as a lunatic, paranoid fringe.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“on the whole, women’s rights conventions were white, and Black conventions were male.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“I once saw a book advertised, entitled, ‘New Views of the Constitution.’ I was startled! What right has a man to start new views upon it?”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“If we adopt the principle of this proviso,” he warned, “I hope and believe, that our posterity will blush, when they see the names recorded in favour of such a discrimination.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“By the end of the 1840s, in a union of thirty-one states, Black men could vote without restriction in only four: Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“A great many of the conventions that took place before the Civil War involved adding the word white to state constitutions.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“The People, in this sense—an idea so codified that it’s best capitalized—did not include poor men, the enslaved, or women.”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

“Let it not be said in future generations that money was made by the founders of the American states an essential qualification in the rulers of a free people.” 31”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution