Constitution Quote by Felix Frankfurter

Words, especially those of a constitution, are not to be read with such stultifying narrowness.

— Harlan F. Stone

The constitution of the United States is to receive a reasonable interpretation of its language, and its powers, keeping in view the objects and…

— Anonymous

Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a…

— Joseph Sobran

The framers of the constitution employed words in their natural sense; and, where they are plain and clear, resort to collateral aids to interpretation…

— Melville Fuller

The particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that…

— John Marshall

“The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made…

— Jill Lepore

A constitution, in the American sense of the word, is a written instrument by which the fundamental powers of the government are established, limited,…

— Samuel Freeman Miller

The Constitution is a 200-year-old parchment, simply because we digitize the words should not suggest their meanings change.

— Ed Markey

Constitutions are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the…

— Joseph Story

The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax

— Thomas Paine

The Constitution is what the judges say it is.

— Charles Evans Hughes

We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that…

— John Marshall Harlan II