This is a discussion on The Constitution not written in stone within the The Political and Social Snake Pit forums, part of the Current Happenings category; Happy for us that when we find our constitutions defective and insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we ...
Happy for us that when we find our constitutions defective and insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms to amend or to restore their constitutions." --Thomas Jefferson to C. W. F. Dumas, 1787. ME 6:295, Papers 12:113
:.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; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15
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