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|  John Adams | A question arises whether all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, shall be left in this body? I think a people cannot be long free, nor ever happy, whose government is in one Assembly. | |
| John Adams | There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state. | |
| John Adams | I Said to my Wife, I have accepted a Seat in the House of Representatives and thereby have consented to my own Ruin to your Ruin and the Ruin of our Children. I give you this Warning that you may prepare your Mind for your Fate. | |
| John Quincy Adams | All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals. | |
| Samuel Adams | He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people. | |
| Samuel Adams | The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. | |
| Samuel Adams | And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions. | |
| Donald Alexander | We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some violation. | |
| Roger Allen | Congress is continually appointing fact-finding committees, when what we really need are some fact-facing committees. | |
| Fisher Ames | We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge. | |
| Amos v. Mosley | If the legislature clearly misinterprets a Constitutional provision, the frequent repetition of the wrong will not create a right. | |
| Anacharsis | The forum [is] an established place for men to cheat one another, and behave covetously. | |
| Walter Bagehot | A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness. | |
| F. Lee Bailey | Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out
of committee. | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary? | |
| Gerald Barzan | Taxation with representation ain't so hot either. | |
| Billings v. Hall | Under our form of government, the legislature is not supreme ... like other departments of government, it can only exercise such powers as have been delegated to it, and when it steps beyond that boundary, its acts, like those of the most humble magistrate in the state who transcends his jurisdiction, are utterly void. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | Every bureaucrat has a constitutional right to fuzzify, profundify and drivelate. It's a part of our freedom of speech...If people can understand what is being said in Washington, they might want to take over their own government again. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | When in charge, ponder... When in trouble, delegate... When in doubt, mumble. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. | |
| James Burgh | All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. | |
| Edmund Burke | Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | [The war in Iraq is] a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times...a new world order can emerge. | |
| Sen. Robert C. Byrd | Is it any wonder, why the approval ratings of the Congress go up every time we go into recess? | |
| John C. Calhoun | To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ... | |
| Oscar Callaway | I regret to say it, but we are gradually turning over the business of Congress, turning over all our constitutional rights, turning over our powers delegated by the people to a lot of editors, theorists, and college professors who are not capable of conducting our affairs and to whom we should not abdicate. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest. | |
| Stephen Chippendale | The federal criminal code currently includes more than 3,000 offenses and hardly a congressional session goes by without an attempt to add new sections. | |
| Joseph H. Choate | The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic - what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been
addressed to any political assembly in the world. | |
| Rev. Nicholas Collin | While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody. | |
| Council on Foreign Relations | [A] possible further difficulty is cited, namely, that arising from the Constitutional provision that only Congress may declare war. This argument is countered with the contention that a treaty will override this barrier, let alone the fact that our participation in such police action as might be recommended by the international security organization need not necessarily be construed as war. | |
| Tench Coxe | The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. | |
| Tench Coxe | Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. | |
| Edward H. Crane | Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, of course, lays out the delegated, enumerated, and therefore limited powers of Congress. Only through a deliberate misreading of the general welfare and commerce clauses of the Constitution has the federal government been allowed to overreach its authority and extend its tendrils into every corner of civil society. | |
| Davy Crockett | We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not attempt to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money. | |
| Davy Crockett | We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money. | |
| Davy Crockett | There ain't no ticks like poly-ticks. Bloodsuckers all. | |
| Walter Cronkite | It is a seldom proffered argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing. | |
| John C. Danforth | I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. ... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected. | |
| William Richardson Davie | So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | The electors see their representative not only as a legislator for the state but also as the natural protector of local interests in the legislature; indeed, they almost seem to think that he has a power of attorney to represent each constituent, and they trust him to be as eager in their private interests as in those of the country. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | There is hardly a congressman prepared to go home until he has at least one speech printed and sent to his constituents, and he won't let anybody interrupt his harangue until he has made all his useful suggestions about the 24 states of the Union, and especially the district he represents. | |
| Demosthenes | There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. | |
| William O. Douglas | The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the States shall make “no law” which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that “no law” does not mean what it says, that “no law” is qualified to mean “some” laws. I cannot take this step. | |
| William Drayton | If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money? | |
| Lou Erickson | We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games. | |
| Federal Farmer | Besides, to lay and collect internal taxes in this extensive country must require a great number of congressional ordinances, immediately operation upon the body of the people; these must continually interfere with the state laws and thereby produce disorder and general dissatisfaction till the one system of laws or the other, operating upon the same subjects, shall be abolished. | |
| Eric Felton | Legislators like pork because it helps them get reelected. They are interested in administrative details because long tenure promotes narrow specialization. The constituent service racket allows lawmakers to ignore big problems by fixing small ones. In becoming ombudsman -- glorified errand boys, -- incumbents build up enough good will for most to survive even a watershed year like 1992. By ending congressional careerism, term limits will encourage attention to larger legislative issues. By changing the understanding of the legislator's role, term limits are probably the most effective single reform that can be imposed on Congress. And imposed it will have to be: While great majorities of the American people support term limits, lawmakers oppose them in even larger proportions. With a career Congress, voters face a dilemma: They do not like paying taxes to Washington and hoping to get them back in the form of pork and entitlements, but as long as the system is rigged, it makes sense to vote for the incumbent to maximize your own take. Congressmen face a similar dilemma: Take the easy road to reelection or face the often difficult choices of balancing local and national interests. Take away the career mindset and both representatives and voters can make choices based on the merits of each case. ... In fact, one of the biggest benefits of non-professional legislators is that they would be unlikely to join with the bureaucrats and special interests in blowing smoke at the voters. | |
| Brock Fiant | Most people know more about their congressmen via smear campaigns than they know about their own neighbor via conversations, and a lot of people know more about Britney Spears via tabloids than they know about their own congressmen via voting booklets. Does anyone else see the problem here? | |
| Justice Stephen J. Field | Here I close my opinion. I could not say less in view of
questions of such gravity that go down to the very foundations of the government. If the
provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course
of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but
the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will
become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness. | |
| Millard Fillmore | Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our revolution. They existed before. | |
| First Amendment in the Bill of Rights | Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. | |
| Justice Melville Fuller | To hold that Congress has general police power would be to hold that it may accomplish objects not intrusted to the general government, and to defeat the operation of the 10th Amendment, declaring that 'the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.' | |
| Edward Gibbon | The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost when the legislative power is dominated by the executive. | |
| William Branch Giles | [It is not the purpose nor right of Congress] to attend to what generosity and humanity require, but to what the Constitution and their duty require. | |
| Sen. John Glenn | Why, if we had to do that we could not pass most of the laws we enact around here...
Americans just want us to solve America's problems of health and safety -- and not be concerned if they can be constitutionally justified. | |
| Justice Arthur Goldberg | It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct
war and to regulate the Nation's foreign relations are subject to the
constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity
for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the
gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional
history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that
there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental
constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit
governmental action. | |
| Walter Goodman | Corruption is no stranger to Washington; it is a famous resident. | |
| G. Edward Griffin | No one in America fully understands the constantly changing Internal Revenue Code.
Agents of the IRS do not, judges do not, congressmen do not, and most assuredly taxpayers do not. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | [W]ar is a question, under our constitution, not of Executive, but of Legislative cognizance. It belongs to Congress to say whether the Nation shall of choice dismiss the olive branch and unfurl the banners of War. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense... | |
| Alexander Hamilton | No legislative act contrary to the Constitution can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy (agent) is greater than his principal; that the servant is above the master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people; that men, acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid. It is not to be supposed that the Constitution could intend to enable the representatives of the people to substitute their will to that of their constituents. A Constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by judges as fundamental law. If there should happen to be a irreconcilable variance between the two, the Constitution is to be preferred to the statute. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces, as first general and admiral ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies -- all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature. | |
| Patrick Henry | Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands? | |