Thomas Paine Quotes
Government without a constitution, is a power without a right.
Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man: Part the Second. J. S. Jordan, 1792, p. 28.
The president was asked if he supported the Supreme court's school desegregation decision:
Powell was the Secretary of State and Addington kept advising the administration that as long as the President was acting in defense of the country in his capacity as Commander in Chief, he did not have to obey any existing laws that had been Constitutionally passed which in the opinion of the President restricted or limited the President or the executive branch. Addington was an attorney and Assistant to the Vice President, but he was given much responsibility for administration policy. Powell the Secretary of State of the Administration could not have disagreed more and although most politicians including Republicans disagreed with the Addington thesis, Powell was one of the few Republicans to criticize the Addington position.
When people see the process as unfair and insensitive to minority rights and issues— rammed through by one group which wants to dictate how the rest should live, they never even reach the point of considering carefully the actual language and making compromises with that. They just oppose the constitution in toto usually by finding the 2 or 3 most egregious clauses and harping on those with no attempt to improve them and rejecting the entire constitution.
Thomas Paine was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights. Historian Saul K. Padover described him as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination".
