Every word is a word of plain speech, the ordinary meaning of which even the man in the street knows.

It is a model of simplicity, and as it flows through the reaches of history it will always excite the admiration of those who love clarity and not rhetorical excesses.

It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.

Most men indeed as well as most sects in religion think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.

For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.

It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does....

Thus, I consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.

On the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility--and to make manifest our unanimity, put…

Truly this spirit of Doctor Franklin could be profitably invoked in this day and generation, when nations are so intolerant of the ideas of other nations.

But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.

The career of the new nation thus formed has hitherto been a rising and not a setting sun.

Prophetic as was his vision, he could never have anticipated the reality of to-day, for this nation, thus deliberately formed in the light of reason and without blood or passion, is to-day, by common consent, one of the greatest and, I…

It could not have been ratified had there not been an assurance that there would be immediate amendments to provide a Bill of Rights to safeguard the individual.

This stability is the more remarkable when we recall the profound and revolutionary change that has taken place in the social life of man since the Constitution was adopted.

The industrial revolution, which has more profoundly affected man in the last century and a half than all the changes which had theretofore taken place in the life of man since the cave-dweller, was only then beginning.

While it is true that the text of the instrument has suffered almost as little change as the Nicene Creed, yet it would be manifest error to suggest that in its development by practical application the Constitution has not undergone great…

To have prescribed the means by which government should in all future times execute its powers would have been to change entirely the character of the instrument and to give it the properties of a legal code.

It would have been an unwise attempt to provide by immutable rules for exigencies which, if foreseen at all, must have been foreseen dimly, and can best be provided for as they occur.

In this great purpose of enumerating rather than defining the powers of government its framers were supremely wise.

While it was marvellously sagacious in what it provided, it was wise to the point of inspiration in what it left unprovided.

Nothing is more admirable than the self-restraint of men who, venturing upon an untried experiment, and after debating for four months upon the principles of government, were content to embody their conclusions in not more than four…

The Constitution is neither, on the one hand, a Gibraltar rock, which wholly resists the ceaseless washing of time or circumstance, nor is it, on the other hand, a sandy beach, which is slowly destroyed by the erosion of the waves.

It is rather to be likened to a floating dock, which, while firmly attached to its moorings, and not therefore the caprice of the waves, yet rises and falls with the tide of time and circumstance.

Fortunately, the framers of the Constitution had learned a rude and terrible lesson in the anarchy that had followed the War of Independence.

The consequence is that again and again we are running the risk of perpetrating the most grotesque errors of judgment, of committing the most serious political blunders, in defiance of American public opinion.