A Quote by Bernard Bailyn

What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.

Bernard Bailyn

Quote Topics

Any Certain Collect Constitutional Constitutional Right Effort Had Kinds Nothing Objection Opposed Others Parliament Principles Really Right Taxes Were

Quote Author

Bernard Bailyn
American - Historian
Born: September 9, 1922

The Constitution of the United States has absolutely nothing to say about a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Were the federal courts to recognize such a right, it would be completely without constitutional basis.

Newt Gingrich

What about your constitutional right to bear arms, you say. I would simply point out that you don’t have to exercise a constitutional right just because you have it. You have the constitutional right to run for president of the United States, but most people have too much sense to insist on exercising it.

Chelsea Handler

If Charlton Heston can have a constitutional right carry a rifle, why can't grandma have a constitutional right to health care?

Al Sharpton

[I]n constitutional adjudication some steps, which when taken were thought to approach 'the verge,' have become the platform for yet further steps. A certain momentum develops in constitutional theory and it can be a 'downhill thrust' easily set in motion but difficult to retard or stop.

Warren E. Burger

People do not have a constitutional right to be married any more than we could say that someone has a constitutional right to a driver's license. You either meet the requirements or you don't. In the case of marriage, homosexuals do not meet the requirements of marriage.

Erwin W. Lutzer

...it is not only the general principles of justice that are infringed, or at least set aside, by the exclusion of women, merely as women, from any share in the representation; that exclusion is also repugnant to the particular principles of the British Constitution. It violates one of the oldest of our constitutional maxims...that taxation and representation should be co-extensive. Do not women pay taxes?

John Stuart Mill

There was not a member of the Constitutional Convention who had the least objection to what is contended for by the advocates for a Bill of Rights and trial by jury.

George Washington

It is a president's constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and it is the Senate's constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent.

Mitch McConnell

Voting is a Constitutional right. Absent any evidence of fraud, all Americans have a protected right to vote, be they rich or poor, black, Hispanic or white, people who live in a big city or in remote rural areas.

Juan Williams

I don't think the federal government has any business keeping a list of law-abiding Americans who exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Ted Cruz

If there's a distinct group of Americans who harbor open contempt for constitutional principles and rule of law, it's lawyers, judges and members of Congress.

Walter E. Williams

It is one thing to say that there is a constitutional right to keep a gun at home for protection. It is quite another to say there is a constitutional right to bring a hidden gun into a daycare center.

Adam Cohen

Our principles were revolutionary. We began as a small, weak republic. But we survived. Our example inspired others, imperfectly at times, but it inspired them nevertheless. This constitutional republic, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, prospered and grew strong. To this day, America is still the abiding alternative to tyranny. That is our purpose in the world - nothing more and nothing less.

Ronald Reagan

A government on the principles on which constitutional governments arising out of society are established, cannot have the right of altering itself. If it had, it would be arbitrary. It might make itself what it pleased; and wherever such a right is set up, it shows there is no constitution.

Thomas Paine

There is no superior person by constitutional standards. An applicant who is white is entitled to no advantage by reason of that fact, nor is he subject to any disability, no matter what his race or color. Whatever his race, an applicant has a constitutional right to have his application considered on its individual merits.