EDWIN MEESE

The implication that everyone would have to accept its judgments uncritically, that it was a decision from which there could be no appeal, was astonishing.

Nicaragua is fast becoming a terrorist country club.

An expert is somebody who is more than 50 miles from home, has no responsibility for implementing the advice he gives, and shows slides.

Even the animal inspectors of the Department of Agriculture have a badge and carry a gun. Everyone wants a badge and a gun. Then they want arrest powers. Then, red lights on their car, and finally they want law enforcement retirement benefits …. It’s hard to find all the people in the federal government who have badges and guns.

Guns go boom. Explosives go boom. That seems to be the reason that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms regulates both.

I had been in the administration long enough to know that Cabinet rank meant nothing.

I have refused to bend under the constant drumbeat and media attention.

What, then, should a constitutional jurisprudence actually be? It should be a jurisprudence of Original Intention.... The original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes [is] the only reliable guide for judgment.

The terrorist determines the time, manor, place and mode of attack.

There are a lot of weak people out there who will say almost anything they think a prosecutor wants them to say to save their skins.

Usual rules—no samples.

You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime.

Pastors can lead the way in motivating the faithful to wise stewardship of their citizenship responsibilities. Without a healthy culture and civil society, limited government and ordered liberty will be impossible.

In 'The Heritage Guide to the Constitution,' you find a most remarkable collection of scholarly work. Over a hundred people have contributed to explaining what the Constitution says, what it means, how it has been interpreted over the years, and how it is important to people today.

The federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed unanimously in the House, won 97 votes in the Senate, and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Twenty states have passed their own versions of this law, and 11 additional ones have religious-liberty protections that state courts have interpreted to provide a similar level of protection.

I've been in several situations where police officers and district attorneys have had the cooperation of people in the news media without either endangering the reporter or compromising their sources.

Expanding a failing, big-government program that reduces flexibility for the states and traps generations of Americans in dependency is not consistent with the kind of conservative solutions that Reagan sought during his terms as governor of California and president of the United States.

As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.

In most countries, you have a monarch or some other principal person to whom its officers and its military swear their allegiance. Our officials in this country and our military swear allegiance to the Constitution. We say that when we say the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.

America was founded to be a beacon of liberty, particularly religious liberty. The framers of our Constitution sought to preserve religious liberty to such an extent that they made it the first right protected in the Bill of Rights.

The 1986 act didn't turn illegal immigrants into citizens on the spot. It granted temporary resident status only to those who could prove they had resided continuously in America for five years. After 18 months, their status could be upgraded to permanent residency, and only after another five years could they become U.S. citizens.

To restore the American experiment in democratic self-government, religious believers need to redouble their civic efforts. For without our active participation in politics, the government will continue to trample on our rights. The Constitution does not prevent people of faith from being active in politics.

The United States is in a time of transition. Courts have redefined marriage, and beliefs about human sexuality are changing. Will the right to dissent be protected? Will the right of Americans to speak and act in accord with what the United States had always believed about marriage - that it's a union of husband and wife - be tolerated?

President Reagan, expanding on President Lincoln's phrase, referred to America as 'the last, best hope of man on Earth.' But this last, best hope is beginning to fade.

Reagan cut through irrational federal regulations to allow children to live with their parents, where they could receive care that would cost the taxpayer one-sixth as much as institutional care. By contrast, Obamacare has added thousands of pages of bureaucratic regulations and will cost the federal government untold billions.