I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

The framers of our Constitution meant we were to have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

A punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor.

The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that… it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.

I believe that a government has only one religion – India first. A government has only one holy book – our Constitution. A government has only one kind of devotion – towards nation.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

The purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced – the just demands of peace and security will be met – or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you’ve got to compromise. You’ve got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.

There’s nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.

The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

No matter how you cut it, this real debate on personal accounts is about the legitimacy of Social Security; it’s not about the solvency of Social Security.

I deplore the need or the use of troops anywhere to get American citizens to obey the orders of constituted courts.

Laws should be interpreted in a liberal sense so that their intention may be preserved.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, ‚We, the people.‘

You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do, especially in Philadelphia in 1787, four months, they argued about what a House should be, what a Senate should be, the power of the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery.

Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

Courage that grows from constitution often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; courage which arises from a sense of duty acts; in a uniform manner.

I have been a firm believer in the federal structure of our country as enshrined in the Constitution.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Our constitution is a ray of hope: H for harmony, O for Opportunity, P for people’s participation and E for equality.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

When we wrote the Constitution, the intention was to give the commander in chief the authority how to use the forces when you authorize him to be able to use the forces.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

History is written by the victors.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

Collegiality is crucial to the success of our mission. We could not do the job the Constitution assigns to us if we didn’t – to use one of Justice Antonin Scalia’s favorite expressions – ‚Get over it!‘

The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

When I took over as president, I studied the Constitution, and the more I studied it, the more I realised that it does not prevent the president of India from giving the nation a vision. So when I went and presented this vision in Parliament and in legislative assemblies; everyone welcomed it, irrespective of party affiliations.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

The emotions in a song – the anger, aggression – have got to be legitimate.