David Cunliffe Quotes

Nobody wants a stalemate in constitutional development.

The Constitution is a document that should only be amended with great caution.

Frequent appeals to the people [to amend the Constitution] would in great measure deprive the government of that veneration which time bestows on everything.

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.

Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters.

I believe in an evolving Constitution. A flexible Constitution leaves room for us to consider not merely how the world once was, but how it ought to be.

A constitutional tradition that works is one that is in a constant state of dynamic evolution. You have a written constitution that says 'x,' but no constitutional system works if it just follows what's in that written constitution and never changes. Interpretation gives it the freedom to change.

Amending the U.S. Constitution, the document most sacred to those who love freedom and liberty, is a delicate endeavor and should be done only on the basis of the most clear and convincing evidence that a proposed amendment is necessary.

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.

The American Constitution has changed, is changing, and by the law of its very existence must continue to change, in its substance and practical working even its words remain the same.

The path to an amendment to the Constitution is a thorny one.

I deny that the power of amendment [of the Constitution] carries the power of revolution.

A constitution … is good for a certain people and for a certain time. It shouldn’t be mummified.

Our fundamental instrument of government [the Constitution] is an evolving document.

If there be any real support among the people for such a constitutional amendment, it is so small that not even one person has been able to get himself a job as a lobbyist to come before the Congress and try to have it pass the joint resolution.

This [nullification] is a normal and traditional American method of circumventing the inflexibility of the Constitution. When the Constitution has come into conflict with the living needs of the nation, and when amendment was impossible, the method of changing the Constitution has been to change it and then get the very human Supreme Court to sanction it.

If by the statement that what the Constitution meant at the time of its adoption it means today, it is intended to say that the great clauses of the Constitution must be confined to the interpretation which the framers, with the conditions and outlook of their time would have placed upon them, the statement carries its own refutation. It was to guard against such a narrow conception that Chief Justice Marshall uttered a memorable warning— ‘We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding ... a constitution intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.’

Referendums have often turned a country inward

… they are terrified lest the Constitution be interpreted as it was meant to be interpreted in each age according to that period's own ideas instead of those of the past generation. It seems to me it would be more intelligent to be afraid lest we strangle democracy by letting a fossilizing process harden the Constitution into a cocoon which must be violently broken because it could not grow with the life within. Life implies growth, and the Constitution was never meant to be used as the Bible was by our most puritanical Puritans.

I noticed that parts of the opposition have been hostile to any revision of the constitution.

One of the things about the Constitution - that our forefathers wrote, and basically, there were none of our foremothers that were there. There were none of our fore-sisters there. There are changes that can take place, and there is room to change.

Vernon Bogdanor's account The Monarchy and the Constitution is written as much in the shadow of Edmund Burke as it is of Walter Bagehot. He stresses the organic development of the British constitution, prefers evolution to revolution, and thinks stability is better than strife.

In the same period that the Americans have lived under one constitution our French friends notched up five. A Punch cartoon has a 19th century Englishman asking a librarian for a copy of the French constitution, only to be told: 'I am sorry Sir, we do not stock periodicals.'

I did not enter the Labour Party 47 years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris

A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.