Gordon S. Wood Quotes About Constitution

Quotes about: Constitution

• [The Massachusetts constitution] resembles the federal Constitution of 1787 more closely than any of the other revolutionary state constitutions. It was also drawn up by a special convention, and it provided for popular ratification - practices that were followed by the drafters of the federal Constitution of 1787 and subsequent state constitution-makers.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Practice, Special, Massachusetts

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• [John] Adams said his objective in writing his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States and his Davila essays was to counter what he thought was the unfair criticism of the American state constitutions made by the French philosophers, especially [Anne Robert Jacques] Turgot.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Writing, Criticism, United States

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• [John Adams' writings] had indicted the United States for slavishly copying the English constitution by erecting bicameral legislatures in their state constitutions, most drafted in 1776.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Writing, Copying, United States

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• [John] Adams was arguing that a separate social order existed that needed to be embodied in senates and his fellow Americans could not accept this and accused him rightly of being obsessed with the English constitution.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Order, Arguing, Constitution

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• I think [John Adams's] influence on the federal Constitution was indirect. Many including James Madison mocked the first volume of Adams's Defence of the Constitutions of the United States in 1787. But his Massachusetts constitution was a model for those who thought about stable popular governments, with its separation of powers, its bicameral legislature, its independent judiciary, and its strong executive.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Strong, Independent, Thinking

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• By the time [John Adams] came to write his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States in 1787 he had as dark a view of the American character as that of any critic in our history.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Writing, Character, Dark

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• It was [John's Adams] Massachusetts constitution if anything that influenced people.

  Gordon S. Wood

  People, Massachusetts, Constitution

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• Perhaps more significant than his experience in Europe, though, was [John] Adams's experience in his own country, and his extensive reading on the history of the English constitution. In 1779, he had an opportunity to try out his ideas by framing the Massachusetts constitution.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Country, Reading, Opportunity

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• [ Massachusetts constitution] was [John Adams] attempt to justify that structure by the traditional notion of social estates - that the executive represented the monarchical estate, the senate the aristocratic estate, and the house of representatives the estate of the people.

  Gordon S. Wood

  People, House, Massachusetts

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• The Massachusetts constitution was written much later than the other revolutionary state constitutions, and thus it avoids some of the earlier mistakes. The executive is stronger, with a limited veto; the senate is more formidable; and the judiciary is independent.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Mistake, Independent, Stronger

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

• This rationale, which justified the mixed constitution of Great Britain, might have made some sense in 1776, but by 1787 most American thinkers had come to believe that all parts of their balanced governments represented in one way or another the sovereign people. They had left the Aristotelian idea of mixed estates - monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy - way behind. [John] Adams had not, and his stubbornness on this point caused him no end of trouble.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Believe, Government, Ideas

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

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