In all great changes of established governments, forms ought to give way to substance

A distinction of property results from that very protection which a free Government gives to unequal faculties of acquiring it.

The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a social right.

The express authority of the people alone could give validity to the Constitution.

Those who proposed the Constitution knew, and those who ratified the Constitution also knew that this is...a limited government tied down to specified powers....It was never supposed or suspected that the old Congress could give away the money of the states to encourage agriculture or for any other purpose they pleased.

Nothing could be more irrational than to give the people power, and to withhold from them information without which power is abused.

You give me a credit to which I have no claim in calling me "the writer of the Constitution of the United States." This was not, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, the offspring of a single brain. It ought to be regarded as the work of many heads and many hands.

[I]n the next place, to show that unless these departments be so far connected and blended as to give to each a constitutional control over the others, the degree of separation which the maxim requires, as essential to a free government, can never in practice be duly maintained.