Cool Quotes - U

[Let any modification of the constitutional powers be done] by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.

It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.

Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists, until changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.

It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading.

When the Constitution was first framed I predicted that it would last fifty years. I was mistaken. It will evidently last longer than that. But I was mistaken only in point of time. The crash will come, but not quite so quick as I thought.

There is a higher law than the Constitution.

I yield slowly and reluctantly to the conviction that our Constitution cannot last. Our opinions are incompatible with a united government, even among ourselves. The Union has been preserved thus far by miracles. I fear they cannot continue.

What's the Constitution among friends?

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.

The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.

If the Constitution is to be construed to mean what the majority at any given period in history wish the Constitution to mean, why a written Constitution and deliberate processes of amendment?

I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.

He [Grant] is a scientific Goth, resembling Alaric, destroying the country as he goes and delivering the people over to starvation. Nor does he bury his dead, but leaves them to rot on the battlefield.

Such, indeed, is the uncertainty of all human affairs, that security and despair are equal follies; and as it is presumption and arrogance to anticipate triumphs, it is weakness and cowardice to prognosticate miscarriages.

They condemn what they do not understand. (Damnant quod non intelligunt.)

An emendation of the text has been proposed: but surely the learning of the ancients had been long ago obliterated, had every man thought himself at liberty to corrupt the lines which he did not understand.

The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for some more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointment and complaints.

Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and that the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.

But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past.

Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.

Unions may have existed to serve workers' interests at one time. These days, they exist to serve liberalism.

When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.

British trade unionism has … become a formula for national misery.

[A closed shop union] is evil because it is a form of monopoly achieved by coercion and it has all the anti-social consequences of any other monopoly.

[Union leaders are] an ugly factional interest, like any other which has stained the pages of history, operating at the expense of the community, and motivated by an insatiable lust for personal power, and by enormous greed.

More and more, the UN begins to resemble, and sound like, a thieves' kitchen. … why do the powers still attached to civilised standards continue to give it their countenance?

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

I'm astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

San Diego State University [is] Harvard, without all the smart people.

It is a myth that universities are nurseries of reason. They are hot-houses for every kind of extremism, irrationality, intolerance and prejudice, where intellectual and social snobbery is almost purposefully instilled and where dons attempt to pass on to their students their own sins of pride.

Universities are the most overrated institutions of our age.

He that lives in a college, after his mind is sufficiently stocked with learning, is like a man who, having built and rigged and victualled a ship, should lock her up in a dry dock.

The delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefiting from university training, but have somehow failed to find their way there, is … a necessary component of the expansionist case … More will mean worse.

I feel no pain dear mother now
But oh, I am so dry!
O take me to a brewery
And leave me there to die.

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.

Utopian movements produce dystopias.

What begins as a Utopian vision, always — always — ends in bloodshed. Because you have to force a utopia on a free people. Free people want to pursue their own happiness, but a one-size-fits-all approach requires herding the free, against their will, into the state's idea of what's right. Then it's not utopia.