Shakespeare onegets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere, one is intimate with him by instinct.

-Austen,Jane
  Mansfield Park, ch.34.

   The Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime President.

-Biddle, Francis Beverley
  In Brief  Authority.

Like the British constitution, cricket was not made: it has 'grown'.

-Cardus, Sir Neville
  English Cricket.

Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstoneöan extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisyand superstition and with one commanding characteristic.Whether Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition, whether preaching, praying, speechifying, or scribblingöneveragentleman.Heisso vain that he wants to figure in history as the settler of all the great questions; but a parliamentary Constitution is not favourable to such ambitions. Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

-Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
c.1874  Letter.

Somepunishment seemspreparing fora peoplewhoare so ungratefully abusing the best Constitution and the best king that any nation was ever blessed with.

-Franklin, Benjamin
  Speech in London during the Wilkes riots, May.

The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.

-Gibbon, Edward
^88  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch.3.

It is upon those who say that it is necessary to exclude forty-nine fiftieths of the working classes [from the vote] toshowcause, and Iventuretosay that every manwho is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger, is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.

-Gladstone,W(illiam) E(wart)
  House of Commons,11 May.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir† America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.

-King, Martin LutherJr
  Speech at the Lincoln Memorial, 28  Aug, during the March on Washington.

   Assume a particular state of development in the productive facilities of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume a particular civil societyand you will get particular political conditions which are only the official expression of civil society.

-Marx, Karl Heinrich
  Letter to P  V Annenkov, 26 Dec.

The chief aim of their constitution is that, whenever public needs permit, all citizens should be free, so far as possible, to withdraw their time and energy from the service of the body, and devote themselves to the freedom and culture of the mind. For that, they think, is the real happiness of life.

-More, SirThomas
  Utopia (English translation1556), bk.2.

An intelligent Russian once remarked to me,'Every country has its own Constitution.Ours is absolutism moderated byassassination.'

-Mu«  nster, Count Georg
Political Sketches of the State of Europe1814^1867

In the name of the Constitution,Cromwell took up arms, executed the king, dissolved Parliament, imprisoned some, and beheaded others.

-Stalin,Joseph originally Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili
  In conversation with H G Wells, Moscow.

It is alleged indeed, that the high heels are most agreeable to our ancient constitution: but however this be, his Majesty hath determined tomake use of only low heels in the administration of the government.

-Swift,Jonathan
  Gulliver'sTravels,'A Voyage to Lilliput', ch.4.

A cossack's whip wrapped in the parchment of a constitution.

-Trotsky, Leon originally Lev Davidovich Bronstein
  On the October Manifesto, a package of limited constitutional reforms conceded by theTzarist government following the strikes and civil unrest of early October1905. Quoted in Lionel Kochan Russia in Revolution (1967).