The Constitution is ...the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen
A Constitution is not the act of a Government, but of a people constituting a government, and a government without a constitution is a power without right.
The importance of the Bible to a church is to keep the church on track. The role of the Constitution in government is to keep the government on track.
There is no more reason to think that they expected the world to remain static than there is to think that any of us holds a crystal ball. The only way to create a foundational document that could stand the test of time was to build in enough flexibility that later generations would be able to adapt it to their own needs and uses.
So goes America in terms of freedom, so goes the rest of the world. And so that document [Declaration of Independence] I would argue is the foundational document for freedom not just for America but for freedom around the world.
Constitution is not a mere lawyers document, it is a vehicle of Life, and its spirit is always the spirit of Age.
The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantastic still, it imagined a country full of people imagining themselves.
We trace the hand of the Almighty in framing the constitution of our land, and believe that the Lord raised up men purposely for the accomplishment of this object, raised them up and inspired them to frame the Constitution of the United States
The only way to create a foundational document that could stand the test of time was to build in enough flexibility that later generations would be able to adapt it to their own needs and uses.
A constitution is framed for ages to come, and is designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.
