America's Constitution Quotes

“The people may change the constitutions whenever and however they please,” explained Wilson. “It is a power paramount to every constitution, inalienable in its nature.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography

“All this was breathtakingly novel. In 1787, democratic self-government existed almost nowhere on earth.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography

“In the late 1780s, this was the most democratic deed the world had ever seen.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography

“After Vietnam and Watergate, much of the public has come to view the judiciary as more honest and competent than the politicians in other branches. Modern presidents and congressmen are far less likely to assert their own constitutional visions than were their antebellum predecessors. For example, in dramatic contrast to the pattern set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only a handful of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Inaugural Addresses have explicitly meditated upon the Constitution itself, and only a small percentage of recent veto messages have articulated objections based on the president’s independent constitutional judgment.23”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography

“Improved reporting practices have enabled the Court to get its message out, and quickly. Nowadays, in any given case a majority of justices ordinarily sign on to a single “Opinion of the Court,” an opinion widely viewed as the last word on the Constitution’s meaning. Meanwhile, a partisan and crumbly Congress has often found it hard to speak with one voice, and presidents have come to be seen as party politicians rather than impartial magistrates.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography

“Even more telling was the Judicial Article’s silence on issues of judicial apportionment. The precise apportionment rules for the House, Senate, and presidential electors appeared prominently in the Legislative and Executive Articles. These rules reflected weeks of intense debate and compromise at Philadelphia and generated extensive discussion during the ratification process. Yet the Judicial Article said absolutely nothing about how the large and small states, Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, and so on, were to be balanced on the Supreme Court. This gaping silence suggests that the Founding generation envisioned the Court chiefly as an organ enforcing federal statutes and ensuring state compliance with federal norms. Just as it made sense to give the political branches wide discretion to shape the postal service, treasury department, or any other federal agency carrying out congressional policy, so, too, it made sense to allow Congress and the president to contour the federal judiciary as they saw fit.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography

“Against the backdrop of frequent and highly visible gubernatorial vetoes in the colonial era, the Constitution carefully specified the procedures to be followed whenever the president sought to negative a congressional bill. Yet the document failed to specify comparable procedures to be followed when judges sought to void Congress’s output—a small but telling sign that the Founders, with little actual experience with judicial review, did not anticipate that the judicial negative would one day surpass the executive negative as a check on Congress.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography

“the people may undoubtedly change the government, not because it is ill exercised, but because they conceive another form will be more conducive to their welfare.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography

“In the near term, such compromises made possible a continental union of North and South that provided bountiful benefits to freeborn Americans. But in the long run, the Founders’ failure to put slavery on a path of ultimate extinction would lead to massive military conflict on American soil—the very sort of conflict whose avoidance was, as we shall now see, literally the primary purpose of the Constitution of 1788.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography