Top 31 Preamble Quotes & Sayings

If the Constitution was a movie, the Preamble would be the trailer, the First Amendment the establishing shot, the 13th the crowd pleaser and the 14th the ultimate hero scene.

The monument serves to remind the appellate courts and judges of the circuit and district courts of this state and members of the bar who appear before them as well as the people of Alabama who visit the Alabama Judicial Building of the truth stated in the preamble of the Alabama Constitution, that in order to establish justice we must invoke the favor and guidance of Almighty God.

We do, in former chairman Lee Atwater's words, offer the party as a big tent, and therefore that message has to be clear. How we do that within the platform, the preamble to the platform or whatnot, that remains to be seen. But that message will have to be articulated with great clarity.

Well, first let's say that the fundamental responsibility of any government is national security - in the preamble to the Constitution, provide for the common defense and insure domestic tranquility.

When I went to an Aspen seminar on "American Scriptures" - the bicentennial of the Declaration and they discussed the preamble and the Gettysburg Address and much more, but not Lincoln's Second Inauguration, I challenged that omission and they said find something on it and to my astonishment, at that time, there was no book or long article that really did it. So I wrote one that attempted to do it justice. Although obscurely published, that essay got a nice bounce. Somehow David Donald saw it, and in his notes to his biography singled it out.

The real difference between the United States and other nations lies not in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, but in the fact that the substantive clauses of that Constitution are enforced by individuals independent of and not beholden to the elected branches.

If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worth while. . . . The beauty and cogency of the preamble, reaching back to remotest antiquity and forward so an indefinite future, have lifted the hearts of millions of men and will continue to do. . . . These words are more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin, more explosive than the atom, a continual challenge to ourselves as well as an inspiration to the oppressed of all the world.

I never experienced anything in my natural state that was as shocking as salvia divinorum`s effects. The condensed extract is murder. I'd smoked some plain leaf and experienced a very alien, very physical sensation, like wheels grinding against each other all over my body. Odd, not pleasant, but not overwhelming. Someone sent me some extract, and I took a big lungful, started counting, and before I reached twenty I was suddenly and without preamble in a completely altered state.

Our adversaries [ the Confederate States of America ] have adopted some declarations of independence in which, unlike the good old one penned by Jefferson, they omit the words "all men are created equal." Why? They have adopted a temporary national constitution, in the preamble of which, unlike our good old one, signed by Washington, they omit "We, the People," and substitute "We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent States." Why? Why this deliberate pressing out of view, the rights of men, and the authority of the people?

Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved.

The Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider it purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? it is neither.

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy,' kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?

The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

I imagine an America that can actually change. That we become a nation that prospers again but without pillaging the resources of nations that make their people hate us. That we become a nation that, as the constitution says in its preamble, its very first paragraph, 'promotes the general welfare' of its people.

Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble: 'Once upon a time!' ... I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit.

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.

You can't go on like you're going to start really living one day like all this is some preamble to some great life thats magically going to appear. I'm a firm believer that you have to create your own miracles, don't hold out that there's something better waiting on the other side. It doesn't work that way. When you're gone, you're gone. Don't wait.

I'd like to quit thinking of the present as some minor insignificant preamble to something else.

The preamble to the Constitution states: "We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare..." It doesn't say "guarantee the general welfare." And it certainly doesn't say "give welfare benefits to all the people in the country who aren't doing so well even if the reason they aren't doing so well is because they're sitting on their butts in front of the TV".

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.

I wish the government would read the Constitution. I think that would probably help quite a bit. And maybe they did read it and maybe they got confused when they read the preamble which says one of the duties is to promote the general welfare.

Yet the whole preamble of the second authorization act for the Marshall Plan showed the direction Congress was ready to take about breaking down barriers within Europe.

The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the "exalted" substances.

Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.

Indians today are governed by two different ideologies. Their political ideal set in the preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them.

The Constitution's Preamble, its renowned introductory passage, was written by a man with a peg-leg. Which, if you think about it, gives our Constitution hardly a leg to stand on.

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.

The Second Amendment has a preamble about the need for a militia. Because there is a need for a militia to be at the ready, therefore the right to keep and bear arms must be secured.

Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither.