P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.

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

I am a constitutionalist. I believe in the constitution. I don't believe in altering the constitution.

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

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

As you may have heard, the U.S. is putting together a constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? Think about it - it was written by very smart people, it's served us well for over two hundred years, and besides, we're not using it anymore.

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

The Constitution: it's not just a good idea, it's the law.

Its Constitution--the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.

The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows.

The Constitution of the United States was created by the people of the United States composing the respective states, who alone had the right.

The US Constitution serves the same function as the British royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition and continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system of power.

The truth is, after all the declamations we have heard, that the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS.

The conscience of this nation is the Constitution.

My touchstone for every question is the Constitution.

Knowing constitutional law helps one at the opera. The trial in 'Billy Budd,' as example, invokes the fugitive slave clause of the U.S. Constitution.

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.

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.

Neither James Madison, for whom this lecture is named, nor any of the other Framers of the Constitution, were oblivious, careless, or otherwise unaware of the words they chose for the document and its 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.

Americans have to have a link with their Constitution. They have to understand it in the context of their own time.

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

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

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.