Source

John Winthrop

Quote
When the people have chosen men to be their rulers, now to combine togetherin a
public petition to have an order repealedsavors of resisting an ordinance of God. For
the people, having deputed others, have no right to make or alter laws themselves, but
are to be subjects. (30)
they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also,
to set bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them (30)

Thomas Hooker
The foundation of all authority is laidin the free consent of the people. (30)

Roger Williams

John Wise

James Otis

a People may erect and establish what forme of Government seems to them most
meete for their civill condition: It is evident that such Governments as are by them and
established, have no more power nor for no longer time, than the civill power or people
consenting and agreeing shall betrust them with. (30)
The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity, and promote the happiness of
all, and the good of every man in his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, etc., without
any injury or abuse to any. (30)
Now one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of ones
house. (31)
Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. (31)

Patrick Henry

If this be treason, make the most of it. (31)

I am not a Virginian, but an American. (31)

Samuel Adams

I am not of leveling principles: But I am apt to think, that constitution of civil government
which admits equality in the extensive degree, consistent with the true design of
government, is the best (31)

George Washington

Toward the preservation of your Governmentit is requisitethat you resist with care
the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. (31)

Thomas Paine (from his book

The Rights of Man)

The more perfect civilization is, the less occasion it has for government, because the
more it does to regulate its own affairs, and govern itselfAll the great laws of society
are laws of nature. (31)
Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon
want bread. (31)

Thomas Jefferson
I know only that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not
consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no
sentiment which had ever been expressed before. (31)

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high virtues of a good
citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our
country when in danger, are of higher obligation. (34)
Thomas Jefferson
Were not this country already divided into States, that division must be made that each
might do for itself what concerns itself directly. (41)

Alexander Hamilton

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if
the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised
before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who
knows the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow. (32)

James Madison
The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, isan
insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the
first object of government. (32)
Alexander Hamilton

Beveridge (From the book Life

of John Marshall)

President John Adams

The people!---The people is a great beast. (32)

He [John Marshall] was not in the least concerned in the rule of the people as such.
Indeed, he believed that the more they directly controlled public affairs the worse the
business of government would be conducted. He feared that sheer majorities would be
unjust, intolerant, tyrannical, and he was certain that they would be untrustworthy and
freakishly changeable. (33)
There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide. (33)
Now, Story, that is the law; you find the precedents for it. (33)

John Marshall

If any one proposition could command the universal assent of mankind we might expect
it would be this: that the government of the Union, though limited in its powers, is
supreme within the sphere of its action. (McCulloch v. Maryland) (33)
power to tax involves the power to destroy. (33)

Andrew Jackson

I care nothing about clamors, sir, mark me! I do precisely what I think just and right. (35)

Chief Justice Roger Taney

The object and end of all government is to promote the happiness and prosperity of the
community by which it is established. (Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge) (35)
My opinion is that the admission of universal suffrage and a licentious press are
incompatible with government and security to property, and that the government and
character of this country are going to ruin. (36)

James Kent
The men of no property, together with the crowds of dependents connected with great
manufacturing and commercial establishments, and the motley and undefinable
population of crowded ports, may, perhaps, at some future day, under skillful
management, predominate in the assembly, and yet we should be perfectly safe if no
laws could pass without the free consent of the owners of the soil. (36)

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you canAs a

peacemaker a lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be
business enough. (37)
Abraham Lincoln
Not only do I pray for it, on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly forsee that
nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by
consolidating it in a common bond of principle. (37)
Henry George

The equal right of all people to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe
the air it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. (38)

Theodore Roosevelt

"It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough
to ruin it by bad laws." (38)

Woodrow Wilson

There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed
and be great. (38)
While there still is doubt, while opposite convictions still keep a battlefront against each
other, the time for law has not come. (39)
There is nothing that I more deprecate than the use of the Fourteenth Amendment
beyond the absolute compulsion of its words to prevent the making of social experiments
that an important part of the community desires, in the insulated chambers afforded by
the several states, even though the experiments may seem futile or even noxious to me
and to those whose judgment I most respect (Truax v. Corrigan) (39)
If the restraint on the freedom of the members of a combination caused by their entering
into a partnership is a restraint of trade, every such combination, the small as well as the
great, is within the Act. (39)

Oliver Wendell Holmes

This tacit assumption of the solidarity of the interests of society is very common, but
seems to us to be falseAll that can be expectedis that modern legislation should
easily and quickly, yet not too quickly, modify itself in accordance with the will of the de
facto supreme power in the community, and that the spread of an educated sympathy
should reduce the sacrifice of the minority to a minimumThe fact is that legislation in
this country, as well as elsewhere, is empirical. (39)
the provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence
in their form: they are organic living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their
significance is vital, not formal: it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a
dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth. (Gompers v.
United States) (39)
a constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of
paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire. It is
made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain
opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our
judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the
Constitution of the United States. (Lochner v. New York) (39)

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The whole outline of the law is the resultant of a conflict at every point between logic and
good sense the one striving to work fiction out of inconsistent results, the other
restraining and at last overcoming that effort when the results become too manifestly
unjust. (39)
There must be power in the states and the nation to remold, through experimentation,
our economic practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs.
(Dissenting in New State Ice Company v. Liebman) (39)

Louis D. Brandeis
Stare decisis is ordinarily a wise rule of action but it is not a universal, inexorable
command[It] does not command that we err again. (39)
Harlan Fiske Stone

Benjamin Cardozo

courts are concerned only with the power to enact statutes, not with their wisdom.
(United States v. Butler) (39)
Needs that were narrow or parochial a century ago may be interwoven in our day with
the well-being of the nation. What is critical or urgent changes with the times. (Helvering
v. Davis) (39)
Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet
extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential
form. (40)

Franklin D. Roosevelt
History probably will record the National Industrial Recovery Act as the most important
and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress. It represents a
supreme effort to stabilize for all time the many factors which made for the prosperity of
the nation and the preservation of American standards. (40)
Such processes as we have been developing belong to lands which believe in
government by an omnicompetent superman with a hierarchy of superman under him to
whom the life, liberty, and property of the citizen are to be subordinated; who are so allwise as to know offhand what the public interest demands in each case and need no
hearing or evidence or arguments to advise them, but are to adjust all relations and order
all conduct by the light of their ex-officio wisdom in a political organization of society
which does not recognize private rights. (41)
Roscoe Pound
Belief in the obligatory force of contracts and respect for the given word are going if not
gone. (41)
I am skeptical as to the possibility of an absolute judgment. (41)
James F. Byrnes

We are not only transferring too much power from the individual to government, but we
are transferring too many powers of stat governments to the federal government. (41)