Living Document Quotes & Sayings

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading. — Malcolm Gladwell

We are never more than a belief away from our greatest love, deepest healing, and most profound miracles. — Gregg Braden

He felt everything - pride in his competence and leadership during the Second World War, pride in his noble intransigence during the Cold War, intellectual pleasure in what he called the "technically sweet" conception of the H-bomb, self-disgust that he could feel such pleasure in so monstrous a creation - but could decide on nothing. Brilliance of this scattershot type effectively disqualifies a man from political decision-making. Oppenheimer was simply not the sort of man a nation can entrust with its fate. — Algis Valiunas

Progressives did not like the antiquated thinking that saw the Constitution as a barrier to government expansion. The "living Constitution" was born. That benign-sounding phrase (coined later) was conjured up to justify changing the Constitution, without formal amendment, from a limit on power to a blank check. What was impermissible to the federal government by an earlier interpretation became permissible once the Constitution was construed as a evolving document. But by that philosophy, the Constitution is no limit on government power at all. A constitutional government that defines its own powers is a contradiction in terms. — Sheldon Richman

When your child has matured sufficiently to understand how the judicial system works, set a bedtime for him and then send him to bed an hour early. When he tearfully accuses you of breaking the rules, explain that you made the rules and you can interpret them in any way that seems appropriate to you, according to changing conditions. This will prepare him for the Supreme Court's concept of the US Constitution as a 'living document'. — Joseph Sobran

I thought about having a proper room,
breathing life into it, and nobody minding. — Jenny Valentine

When you have the catalog of work, it doesn't feel like you've got one shot to get it right; it's just like, you're making a new document of something at the present time, and it's a living thing, and it changes. It's been cool to help other people make their records, to produce. You get a crash course in things that you don't get as the artist. — Blake Mills

Hurrah for Karamazov! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Attention is something I've learned to ignore. This is what I do: I live my life and they document it. — Rihanna

That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break. But you would have to be an idiot to believe that. The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things. — Antonin Scalia

When you're on, like, NBC, or - I don't want to call out any names. But when you're on bigger networks, they just want to find something that sticks and aren't really necessarily trying to develop anything. On TV Land, they've developed 'The Exes.' — Donald Faison

Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights. — Thurgood Marshall

Bill Clinton, who, to his credit, has established a clear and consistent foreign policy, which is as follows: Whenever the president of the United States gets anywhere near any foreign head of state, living or dead, he gives that leader a big old hug. This has proven to be an effective way to get foreign leaders to do what we want: Many heads of state are willing to sign any random document that President Clinton thrusts in front of them, without reading it, just so he will stop embracing them. — Dave Barry

White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, 'What's the problem with the blacks?' The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority. — Greg Iles

All right, why the glum face now? I get that you messed up, but you need to pick yourself up and move on. — Debbie Macomber

Our laws need to reflect the evolution of technology and the changing expectations of American society. This is why the Constitution is often called a 'living' document. — Al Franken

Nothing. Just that sound, like the sound of starlight scratching its way through outer space: kkkkkkk. — Margaret Atwood

Unfortunately, people are re-interpreting the Constitution as a living document, and it's not. It's a solid-based document and it shouldn't be played with. — Chuck Norris

Since many men believe that adequate sexual functioning is being able to delay ejaculation, some develop strategies to prevent what they consider to be premature ejaculation-strategies that exaggerate emotional distancing, phallocentrism, the focus on orgasm, and objectification. — Michael S. Kimmel

The most successful revolutions aren't those that are celebrated with parades and banners, drums and trumpets, cannons and fireworks. The really successful revolutions are those that occur quietly, unnoticed, uncommemorated. We don't celebrate the day the United States Constitution was destroyed; it didn't happen on a specific date, and most Americans still don't realize it happened at all. We don't say the Constitution has ceased to exist; we merely say that it's a 'living document.' But it amounts to the same thing. — Joseph Sobran

To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar,
motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document. — Neal Stephenson

You're - ' 'Well funded? Yes. Amelie wanted to establish another, less chaotic method of research to validate and record Myrnin's discoveries. You know him; he's brilliant, and he's the living embodiment of chaos theory. So my job is to find out why his discoveries work, document and make them easily reproducible with modern equipment and techniques. And now that's your job, too.' 'I was already doing that. Trying to, anyway. When he'd let me. — Rachel Caine

I used to say that the Constitution is not a living document. It's dead, dead, dead. But I've gotten better. I no longer say that. The truth is that the Constitution is not one that morphs. It's an enduring Constitution, not a changing Constitution. That is what I've meant when I've said that the Constitution is dead. — Antonin Scalia

The important thing is to keep playing, to play against weak opponents and to play for big stakes. — Warren Buffett

Constitution is a living document; no strict constructionism. — Barack Obama

I chose to document the lives of people living in a remote village in Alaska called Shishmaref because there we can literally see how climate change is affecting their homes, livelihoods and ultimately their lives. — Amy J. Berg

To respond is positive, to react is negative. — Zig Ziglar

The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it. — Catherine Crowe

We need to put people on the bench that understand the Constitution is not a living and breathing document. It is to be interpreted as originally meant. — Marco Rubio

The new troops in Iraq need to be Iraqi troops. — Mitch McConnell

Microsoft is still living down its disastrous introduction of Clippy, a ghastly piece of artificial intelligence - I'm using that term very loosely - that would observe people's behavior as they worked on a document and try to bust in, offering 'advice' that tended to be spectacularly useless — Clive Thompson

Be your own place of safety, she told herself, straightening. No crossbar in the world could protect her from what lay ahead, and neither could a tiny knife ticked in her boot - though there her tiny knife would most certainly remain - and neither could a man, not even Akiva. She had to be her own strength, complete unto herself. — Laini Taylor

The Turkish language has changed so radically since the time of Kemal's "Nutuk" that a Turk living today would not be able to understand his actual words. The speech literally has to be translated for contemporary Turkish speakers. Most important, any record, history, or document created prior to 1929 is totally unreadable by all Turks — Eric Bogosian

As priestcraft was always the enemy of knowledge, because priestcraft supports itself by keeping people in delusion and ignorance, it was consistent with its policy to make the acquisition of knowledge a real sin. — Thomas Paine

The Constitution is a total living document that can change quite a bit. — Mark Kirk

Our soldiers did not go to some foreign country and risk their lives in vain and defend our Constitution so that decades later you can tell me it's a living document ever changing and is open to interpretation. The guys who wrote it were light years ahead of anyone today, and they meant what they said - now leave the document alone, or there's going to be trouble. — Ted Nugent

The law is what is read, not what is written. — Donald Kingsbury

When I finally did sit down in front of the machine - a familiar object, I had seen it daily when we were living together - I was reminded of how abrupt and unnatural death always is, at least as we experience it: always an interruption, always things that are left unfinished. This was manifested in Christopher's laptop, the desktop was covered in an intricate mosaic of files and document, there were at least a hundred different and sometimes oddly named folders - other people's work, internet. You name a folder without thinking, there are obvious names for some - accounts, articles - but others have the quality of junk drawers, you hardly remember their contents, you never imagine that one day someone else would be rummaging through them. — Katie Kitamura

Much of the Constitution is remarkably simple and straightforward - certainly as compared to the convoluted reasoning of judges and law professors discussing what is called 'Constitutional law,' much of which has no basis in that document ... The real question [for judicial nominees] is whether that nominee will follow the law or succumb to the lure of 'a living constitution,' 'evolving standards' and other lofty words meaning judicial power to reshape the law to suit their own personal preferences. — Thomas Sowell

An empowering mission statement has to become a living document, part of our very nature, so that the criteria we've put into it are also in us, in the way we live our lives day by day. — Stephen Covey

Saying the Constitution is a living document is the same as saying we don't have a Constitution. — Walter E. Williams