Leonard Cohen Quotes

The Constitution lies at the core of our civil religion.

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

Force does not constitute right... obedience is due only to legitimate powers.

The nation is formed through the law of nature alone. Government stems from the will of nation. The nation stands before all things and is the source of all things. Its will is always law. Above it and before it is but the law of nature alone. By virtue of its very existence, the nation is all things that it may be. The nation cannot surrender its right to a tyrant.

While history informs us of the organic nature of the state, it at the same time gives us to understand that the state does not stand in the same rank with the lower vegetable and animal organisms, but is of a higher order. History represents the state as a moral-spiritual organism, as a great body that is capable of taking into itself the feelings and thoughts of the people, expressing them as law, and realizing them as deed. It acquaints us with the moral qualities, with the character of single states. It ascribes to the state a personality which has endowed its own will with spirit and body, and made it known....

Although The Declaration of Independence is not, like The Constitution, the law of the land, it is certainly the spirit of the land.

At the time the Constitution was framed, the idea of appealing to an American court of justice for an assertion of right or a redress of wrong had perhaps never entered the mind of an Indian or of his tribe. Their appeal was to the tomahawk, or to the Government.

Americans, by means of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution, entered into a social contract which the successive generations assent to yet change its meanings with the changing contexts of different times.

A body politic is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.

I take "We, the People" seriously because I don't know how we build a civilization without reciprocity.

I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.

To people in virtually any age before our own, the only argument that mattered was between extremely small government and no government at all. Extremely small government meant there was at least some law and order; no government meant that there was not.

The state is the legal embodiment of the nation. Political institutions are efficient to the extent to which they express and safeguard national interests.

The people are not satisfied with any form of government, or statute law, until it comes up to their sense of justice; so every progressive State revises its statutes from time to time, and at each revision comes nearer to the absolute right which human nature demands.

The Constitution is not about restricting the people; it is about restricting the government.

Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or galantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

In order to exercise the right to freedom of speech conferred by the Constitution, one should fulfill the social responsibility of a Chinese citizen.

We now occupy the proud attitude of a sovereign and independent Republic, which will impose upon us the obligation of evincing to the world that we are worthy to be free. This will only be accomplished by wise legislation, the maintenance of our integrity, and the faithful and just redemption of our plighted faith wherever it has been pledged.

The Republic is one and can't be divided: That's the Constitution! It means the Republic can't ground its action on local community criteria. Can't accept it.

Ours is the job of interpreting the Constitution. And that document isn't some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams.

I have withdrawn from partisan politics. I am a constitutionalist who believes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be central and the parties must be peripheral.

Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

I love the Constitution. But it's still a document, meant to protect human beings and ensure their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Court has long held that the Constitution protects certain fundamental rights that are not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution's text, while at the same time emphasizing that courts must proceed with great caution in recognizing such rights.