Expansion of Rights Quotes

A new world has come into being since the Constitution was adopted. Are the narrow, limited necessities of the old thirteen states ... to remain the rule of interpretations?

Back a hundred years ago, especially around Woodrow Wilson, what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.

The founding generation would be amazed. It would be surprised. I think it would be very impressed by what has happened since then in terms of our exploding population; in terms of the success of this country economically and otherwise.

People blame the 1960s for just about everything these days, but it was the decade when all that post-war furtiveness and small-mindedness was finally blown open, and opportunity really came knocking.

We had a large common domain, already added by the several States for the common benefit of all; purchase and war might make large additions to this common domain; hence the power over existing and future territories, with the stipulation to admit new States, was conferred.

Since 1920 ... there have been four additional members of Congress established. We have built an office building for each one of them.

So many struggled so that all of us could have a voice in this great democracy and live up to the first three words of our constitution: We the people. I love that phrase so much. Throughout our country's history, we've expanded the meaning of that phrase to include more and more of us. That's what it means to move forward.

One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, 'I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.

Our founders said that everybody mattered, everybody counted. But we all know that they didn't count everybody at the beginning. They did somehow have confidence that each generation of Americans would do a better job with it and would bring more and more people in from the margins and into the heart and soul of our democracy.