Diane Wood Quotes

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

They [our founding fathers] saw the need from the very outset to improve the product [the Constitution].

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

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

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.

The author of our constitution, James Madison, … would be aghast

The two most important documents affecting the destiny of America are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Both these immortal papers relate primarily to the freedom of the individual.

You give me a credit to which I have no claim in calling me "the writer of the Constitution of the United States." This was not, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, the offspring of a single brain. It ought to be regarded as the work of many heads and many hands.

We have a tremendous lack of knowledge of how far we have gotten away from the Constitution of the United States. Democrats and Republicans alike have taken us away from the original intent. You see, I believe in this document as our founding fathers intended it.

Without amendments we would never even have had the Bill of Rights.

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.

Judge Taney requests the American people to believe that the framers of the Constitution did not know their own minds. For the same Statesmen who drew up the Constitution, (which he says forbids Congress to prohibit Slavery in the Territories,) adopted the Ordinance of '87, which prohibited it in all the Territories we then had. The Ordinance was passed in July, 1787 -- the Constitution was framed in September of the same year. The same States and the same men ratified both. And one of the first acts of the first Congress under the Constitution was to reaffirm the Ordinance, and to again prohibit Slavery! Which are the best interpreters of the Constitution, the opinions of Mr. Chief Justice Taney, or the ACTS of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Monroe, Adams, and Washington?

The framers of the constitution were very literate men and they could write very well. When they wrote that “Congress shall make NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” they meant NO LAW. If they had wanted to have some laws or an emergency law, they would not have written, “NO LAW.” They were expert at the English language.

I was in Europe when the Constitution was planned, and never saw it till after it was established. On receiving it, I wrote strongly to Mr. Madison, urging the want of provision for... an express reservation to the States of all rights not specifically granted to the Union

A new world has come into being since the Constitution was adopted. Are the narrow, limited necessities of the old thirteen states ... to remain the rule of interpretations?

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

The Declaration of Independence is no part of the Constitution or of any other book.

Every Constitution embodies the principles of its framers. It is a transcript of their minds. If its meaning in any place is open to doubt, or if words are used which seem to have no fixed signification, we cannot err if we turn to the framers; and their authority increases in proportion to the evidence which they left on the question.

The construction of the language of the Constitution ... as indeed in all other instances where construction becomes necessary, we are to place ourselves as nearly as possible in the condition of the men who framed that instrument.

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. They met novel and desperate situations by establishing unheard-of and revolutionary forms of government.

Many of our statesmen most distinguished for talent and patriotism have been at one time or other of their political career on both sides of each of the most warmly disputed questions forces upon us the inference that the errors, if errors there were, are attributable to the intrinsic difficulty in many instances of ascertaining the intentions of the framers of the Constitution rather than the influence of any sinister or unpatriotic motive.

How a constitution is written can sometimes matter almost as much as what it contains.

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 meaning of freedom is in the U.S. Constitution. Republicans want to live by the document's original meaning.