"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
- Preamble to the United States Constitution

"Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."
- Abraham Lincoln, 1856⁵

"The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon."
- George Washington, 1795⁶

"It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention."
- Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966⁷

"Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor."
- English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1857⁸

"The Constitution was the expression not only of a political faith, but also of political fears. It was wrought both as the organ of the national interest and as the bulwark of certain individual and local rights."
- Progressive author Herbert Croly, 1911⁹

"We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution."
- Charles Evans Hughes, Governor of New York and future Supreme Court Justice, 1907¹⁰

"Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind that brings new political administrations into temporary power."
- Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice, 1970¹¹