“The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone’s.”

“A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.”

“Just think - guns have a constitutional amendment protecting them and women don't.”

“The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.”

“The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?”

“If two thousand five hundred languages are to be lost in the course of the twenty-first century, don’t be in any doubt about what that means for us: in each of those two thousand five hundreds cases a culture will be lost.”