Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Happy for us that when we find our constitutions defective and insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms to amend or to restore their constitutions

Constitutional reform is exasperatingly slow.

[There] is an easy and peaceable way of amending any parts of the Constitution which may be found inconvenient in practice.

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

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

It will give satisfaction to the people; and be a happy means, under providence, of preventing popular commotions, mobs, bloodshed and civil war.

Is there a man who will say that the Constitution wants no reform? Will any man be found to say that the Constitution is perfect?

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

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

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

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.

The functionaries of public power rarely strengthen in their dispositions to abridge it, and an unorganized call for timely amendment is not likely to prevail against an organized opposition to it

I’m incredibly reluctant to amend the Constitution for any purpose.

The Constitution will be reformed in accordance with our revolution.

The problem in any constitutional change is the great care put to solve the problems of the past instead of grasping those of the future.

The example of changing a constitution by assembling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the former examples we had give them. The constitution, too, which was the result of our deliberation, is unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men.

I should prefer to see incorporated into the Constitution a guarantee of universal suffrage; as we cannot get the required two-thirds for that, I cordially support this proposition as the next best

A permanent constitution must be the work of quiet, leisure, much inquiry, and great deliberation.

People now do not want a constitution framed for them by their representatives—they want to pass on each section of it themselves.

A changeless constitution becomes the protector not only of vested rights but of vested wrongs.

We seem to grant less than half a dozen folks in black robes across the street, the right to amend [the Constitution] any time they change their mind.

The more complicated you make a Constitutional amendment …, the more contingencies for which you provide, the more difficult it is to get it passed.

It is highly improper of the President of the United States to employ extra-legal pressures in an effort to defeat the amendment …. The President has no constitutional role to play in the amending process.

Guns and blockades are not conducive to meaningful dialogue.

There is no probability that a vote of two thirds can be commanded for any amendment of the Constitution touching slavery …