Anthony Kennedy Quotes

Our greatest present disloyalty to the Constitution lies in the fact that we do not study and criticize it as did the men who devised and adopted it.

I get nervous every time we start tinkering with the Constitution.

I do not have, nor do I believe I have seen, a vision capacious and convincing enough to propound as an organizing principle for the next phase in the law of our Constitution.

A permanent constitution must be the work of quiet, leisure, much inquiry, and great deliberation.

Every generation of Americans writes its own Constitution.

When we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution ... we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in what was said a hundred years ago.

I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it. The Constitution is as the Supreme Court interprets it and I must conform to this and do my best to see that it is carried out in this country.

I used to have a great fear of constitutional conventions. I have a great fear now of not having one.

I think that he was responsible for putting the flesh and bones on the Constitution.

Are we to admit that the Constitution was never before rightly understood, even by those who framed it?

Do judges follow the Constitution? Well, Yes and No. They follow the Constitution as they understand it.

The Constitutional Convention is the only vehicle through which we can get a clear-cut and unequivocal decision of the people.

People seem to be concerned about the Constitution of the United States only when it pertains to something that is of concern to them.

I wanted the Irish Constitution to be as explicit as it possibly could be, with as few fictions as possible.

The peculiar circumstances of the moment may render a measure more or less wise, but cannot render it more or less constitutional.

Most people revere the Constitution but they do not know what is in it. That may be true of many members of Congress.

It they do not succeed with the Constitution, then they must succeed without it.

I don't believe in altering the Constitution.

You either believe in the Constitution, or you don't.

The conscience of this nation is the Constitution.

For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.

Our great Constitution challenges us to grow constantly.

The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice.

If the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the Nation ... be not the guide in expounding it, there can be no security for a consistent and stable government, more than for a faithful exercise of its powers

… so as not to hazard the Constitution.