“I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution.”

“More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.”

“As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.”

“[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots”

“I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It's a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones.”

“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.”