Woodrow Wilson

The vitality of such provisions consists wholly in the fact that they receive our acquiescence.

The prohibitions of the law do not assert themselves as taskmasters set over us by some external power.

This legal conscience manifestly constitutes the only guarantee, for example, of the division of powers between the state and federal governments, that chief arrangement of our constitutional system.

State functions have certainly not decayed; but they have been preserved, not by virtue of any forces of self-defence of their own, but because the national government has been vouchsafed the grace of self-restraint.

There is no guarantee but that of conscience that justice will be accorded a suitor when his adversary is both court and opposing litigant.

So strong is the instinct of those who administer our governments to keep within the sanction of the law, that even when the last three amendments to the Constitution were being forced upon the southern states by means which were…

As there are times of sorrow or of peril which try men’s souls and lay bare the inner secrets of their characters, so there are times of revolution which act as fire in burning away all but the basic elements of constitutions.

The implying of powers, once cautious, is now become bold and confident.

Constitutional objections, before the war habitual, have, it would seem, permanently lost their prominence.

The whole energy of origination under our system rests with Congress.

It stands at the front of all government among us; it is the single affirmative voice in national policy.

The President, indeed, appoints officers and negotiates treaties, but he does so subject to the ‘yes’ of the Senate.

And it is as much the law of public opinion as the law of the Constitution that restrains the action of Congress.

It is the habit both of English and American writers to speak of the constitution of Great Britain as if it were ‘writ in water,’ because nothing but the will of Parliament stands between it and revolutionary change.

There are vast barriers of conservative public opinion to be overrun before a ruinous speed in revolutionary change can be attained.

In the last analysis, our own Constitution has no better safeguard.

We have, as I have already pointed out, the salient advantage of knowing just what the standards of our Constitution are.

They are formulated in a written code, wherein all men may look and read; whereas many of the designs of the British system are to be sought only in a cloud-land of varying individual readings of affairs.

The arrangements of the British constitution have, for all their theoretical instability, a very firm and definite standing in the political habit of Englishmen: and the greatest of those arrangements can be done away with only by the…

It is wholesome to observe how much of our own institutions rests upon the same basis, upon no other foundations than those that are laid in the opinions of the people.

But we do not think of such a violation of the spirit of the Constitution as possible, simply because we share and contribute to that public opinion which makes such outrages upon constitutional morality impossible by standing ready to…

It is clearly misleading to use the ascendant influence of the President in effecting the objects of civil service reform as an illustration of the constitutional size and weight of his office.

The principal part in making administration pure, business-like, and efficient must always, under any conceivable system of government, be taken by the executive.

In estimating the actual powers of the President it is no doubt best to begin, as almost all writers in England and America now habitually begin, with a comparison between the executives of the two kindred countries.

No prerogative of the Crown is more undisputed than that of taking the initiative in all negotiations with foreign governments, conducting them throughout, and finally completing them by the signature and ratification of a treaty....