Sourced

• *Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee.
  • F. Lee Bailey, Newsweek, 17 April 1967.

• I cannot consider the Bill of Rights to be an outworn 18th Century 'strait jacket'…Its provisions may be thought outdated abstractions by some. And it is true that they were designed to meet ancient evils. But they are the same kind of human evils that have emerged from century to century wherever excessive power is sought by the few at the expense of the many. In my judgement the people of no nation can lose their basic liberty so long as a Bill of Rights like ours survives and its basic purposes are conscientiously interpreted, enforced and respected so as to afford continuous protection against old, as well as new, devices and practices which might thwart those purposes.
  • Justice Hugo Black, dissenting in Adamson v. California (1947)

• In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms...The phrase "the people" meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments — that is, each and every free person.
  A select militia defined as only the privileged class entitled to keep and bear arms was considered an anathema to a free society, in the same way that Americans denounced select spokesmen approved by the government as the only class entitled to the freedom of the press.
  If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the 18th century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis.
  • Stephen P. Holbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right

Unsourced

• The very first item in our Bill of Rights is freedom of the press, freedom of speech.
  • Roy Barnes

• Without adherence to the original understanding, even the actual Bill of Rights could be pared or eliminated. It is asserted nonetheless, and sometimes on high authority, that the judicial philosophy of original understanding is fatally defective in any number of respects.
  • Robert Bork

• The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
  • William J. Brennan, Jr.

• The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority... it is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people.
  • Frank I. Cobb

• The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.
  • Albert Gallatin

• You must remember that, to defeat them, you have to beat them with the principles that this nation was founded upon, man's inalienable right to his own life, Andrew.
  • Dr. Goldstone

• The Declaration of rights is like all other human blessings alloyed with some inconveniences, and not accomplishing fully its object. But the good in this instance vastly overweighs the evil.
  • Thomas Jefferson

• A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences.
  • Thomas Jefferson

• We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.
  • Bill Maher

• Like the government, corporations must be bound with the chains of the Constitution, and especially of the Bill of Rights.
  • L. Neil Smith