Edmund Randolph Quotes

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.

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.

A constitution is not to be made to mean one thing at one time and another some subsequent time when the circumstances may have changed…. the meaning of the Constitution is fixed when it is adopted.

A constitution is framed for ages to come, and is designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it. Its course cannot always he tranquil. It is exposed to storms and tempests, and its framers must be unwise statesmen indeed if they have not provided it, so far as its nature will permit, with the means of self preservation from the perils it may be destined to encounter.

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each successive wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

The American Constitution has changed, is changing, and by the law of its very existence must continue to change, in its substance and practical working even its words remain the same.

Our fundamental instrument of government [the Constitution] is an evolving document.

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

We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding ... a constitution intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adopted to the various crises of human affairs.

To have prescribed the means by which government should, in all future times, execute its powers would … have been an unwise attempt to provide, by immutable rules, for exigencies which, can best be provided for as they occur.

What I reject, out of hand, is the idea that by 5 to 4 Supreme Court judges can rewrite the Constitution, but it takes two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the States to equal 5 judges.

When we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution ... we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in what was said a hundred years ago.

Search the Constitution and you will find no power granted to the legislative branch to make laws governing agriculture, housing, medicine, energy, private ownership or weapons, and a great deal more.

There is an inevitable conflict between different sections of The Constitution and also between The Constitution and certain values.

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history ... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day.

The Constitution of the United States allows us to change; I don't have a problem with that.

The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional.

In our system of democracy, our government works on a system of checks and balances. Instead of stripping power from the courts, I believe we should follow the process prescribed in our Constitution - consideration of a Constitutional amendment.

Over the course of 19 years on the Supreme Court, I learned some lessons about the Constitution of the United States.

The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review; and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left.

Impeachment is not a Constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a Constitutional crisis.

England is the model from which impeachment has been borrowed.

The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power.

The Constitution was made for an undefined and expanding future ... ... is not a fixed formula defined with finality at a particular time. It does not reflect, as a congealed summary, the social arrangements and beliefs of a particular epoch ... The effect of changes in men’s feelings for what is right and just is equally relevant in determining whether a discrimination denies the equal protection of the laws.