• "Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."
  -- James Madison

  
  

• "A treaty cannot be made which alters the Constitution of the country, or which infringes and express exceptions to the power of the Constitution."
  -- Alexander Hamilton

  
  

• "In matters of Power, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

  
  

• "Whatever may be the judgment pronounced on the competency of the architects of the Constitution, or whatever may be the destiny of the edifice prepared by them, I feel it a duty to express my profound and solemn conviction, driven from my intimate opportunity of observing and appreciating the views of the Convention, collectively and individually, that there never was an assembly of men charged with a great and arduous trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them, than were the members of the Federal Convention of 1787."
  -- James Madison

  
  

• "If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates, but let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."
  -- George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796

  
  

• "The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."
  -- Patrick Henry

  
  

• "The strength of the Constitution, lies in the will of the people to defend it."
  -- Thomas Edison

  
  

• "And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions."
  -- Samuel Adams, Debates of the Massachusetts Convention of 1788

  
  

• "The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed and that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of press."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

  
  

• "The government was set to protect man from criminals -- and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government -- as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power."
  -- Ayn Rand

  
  

• "History is clear that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted to secure certain common law rights of the people, against invasion by the Federal Government."
  -- Bell v. Hood, 71 F. Supp., 813, 816 (1947)

  
  

• "There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble opinion, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
  -- John Adams

  
  

• "On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
  --Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823

  
  

• "As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from the womb and long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."
  -- W. E. Gladstone

  
  

• "No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."
  -- Edmund A. Opitz

  
  

• "Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
  -- Daniel Webster

  
  

• "The Constitution is a written instrument. As such, its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when it was adopted, it means now."
  -- South Carolina v. United States, 199 U.S. 437, 448 (1905)