Arundhati Roy Quotes

The constitution of a country should not violate the constitutions of its citizens.

I feel like in 10 or 15 years' time our children are going to look back and say, 'What? You were around when gay people weren't allowed to get married?'

Our society cannot progress while our constitution stands still.

When the 14th Amendment, equal protection clause was enacted, the galleries in the Senate were segregated. Now we have integration.

Legislation and adjudication must follow, and conform to, the progress of society.

Real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions.

Work for legal reform takes place only within the framework of the social form created by the last revolution.

As the civil rights struggle progressed, Americans responded to the justice of the cause, shedding layers of the crusty armor that shielded the white majority from contact with its large black minority. There are layers left. It feels so much better to be on good terms with one another.

I feel so guilty about the state of young people today. And I say that because our generation fought for everything. We fought to sit down at a counter, to sit on a bus. They were left with nothing to fight for.

One day, I know the struggle will change. There's got to be a change - not only for Mississippi, not only for the people in the United States, but people all over the world.

All constitutions, those of the States no less than that of the nation, are designed, and must be interpreted and administered so as to fit human rights.

I look on that paper (the Constitution) as the most fatal plan that could possibly be conceived to enslave a free people.

A treaty cannot be made which alters the Constitution of the country, or which infringes and express exceptions to the power of the Constitution.

The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.

Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension.

Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realization the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.

According to the laws and constitution of the people, which I [the Lord] have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles.

Politics is an obsolete way of doing things. Although it was good a hundred years ago, it has no place in today's high tech society.

Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of menours began, by affirming those rights. They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant wiser; and all better, and happier together.

China is at a different stage of development, human rights are violated here much more often. And still, we see improvements even here.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.

[T]he Constitution was a product of its times. [Progressive]

Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.

Revolution was written into the U.S. Constitution so it's like they're in a constant state of revolution. But then again, happiness is written into their constitution as well, which makes them pretty unique.