Patrick Henry Quotes

The Constitution is the bedrock of all our freedoms; guard and cherish it; keep honor and order in your own house; and the republic will endure.

The more I study it [the Constitution], the more I have come to admire it, realizing that no other document devised by the hand of man ever brought so much progress and happiness to humanity.

So long as we govern our nation by the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, we can be sure that our nation will grow in strength and wisdom and freedom.

The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.

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

In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt reminded us that the Constitution is, and I quote, "a layman's document, not a lawyer's contract."

In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

I am the greatest advocate of the Constitution of the United States there is on the earth. In my feelings I am always ready to die for the protection of the weak and oppressed in their just rights. The only fault I find with the Constitution is, it is not broad enough to cover the whole ground.

We say, that the Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God.

Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.

Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.

We must educate ourselves and others about our precious civil liberties to ensure that we never accept demands that we give up our Constitution so that the government can pretend to protect us.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

No one familiar with the common law of England can read the Constitution of the United States without observing the great desire of the Convention which framed that instrument to make it conform as far as possible with that law.

Government, which does not and did not grant us our rights, must not now seek to deny them by using fear as its justification.

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers.

The appropriate relation of the exercise of constitutional power to the legitimate objects of that power is always a subject of judicial scrutiny.

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

Protect the people from the oppression of dictatorships.

… so as not to hazard the Constitution.

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

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and for government to gain ground.