Thomas Jefferson Quotes

On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

It is arrogant to pretend that ... we can gauge accurately the intent of the Framers [of the Constitution] on application of principle to specific, contemporary questions.

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.

if you want the original intent of the writers of the constitution or the legislation to be the deciding factor, we should appoint 9 historians to the court.

This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers.

We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time.

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

Whatever may have been the intention of the framers of a constitution, or of a law, that intention is to be sought for in the instrument itself, according to the usual and established rules of construction.

What, then, should a constitutional jurisprudence actually be? It should be a jurisprudence of Original Intention.... The original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes [is] the only reliable guide for judgment.

As men whose intentions require no concealment generally employ the words which most directly and aptly express the ideas they in tend to convey, the enlightened patriots who framed our Constitution, and the people who adopted it, must be understood to have employed words in their natural sense, and to have intended what they have said.

It is simply not possible ... to determine the adopter’s specific intentions.

Walter Isaacson attracts the best and the brightest to Aspen. It is exhilarating to listen to the likes of David Rubenstein and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen speak about George Washington and Newt Gingrich and the original intent of the Second Amendment.

It is my belief that there are "absolutes" in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be "absolutes."

Our soldiers did not go to some foreign country and risk their lives in vain and defend our Constitution so that decades later you can tell me it's a living document ever changing and is open to interpretation. The guys who wrote it were light years ahead of anyone today, and they meant what they said - now leave the document alone, or there's going to be trouble.

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

A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it.

The Court is making the preposterous assumption that the People of the United States somehow silently redefined marriage in 1868 when they ratified the 14th Amendment.

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.

The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.

I think our founding fathers believed in nullification. There's no doubt about that.

Now whatever you think of the liberal agenda on its merits, until very recently nobody thought the Constitution meant what liberals now say it means.

[T]here is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution.

I cannot accept this invitation [to celebrate the bicentenial of the Constitution], for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia Convention... To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start. [Progressive]

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.