Michael J. Klarman > Quotes

“when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.”
― Michael J. Klarman, The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution

“Jefferson described and criticized this impulse to attribute to the past “a wisdom more than human” and to treat “constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.”10 Madison’s principal reason for deifying the Founders was his belief that the people could not be trusted to intelligently rule themselves. Citizens must be taught through habit and tradition to obey constituted governmental authority, and reverence for the Founders served that purpose. Without it, the people might too frequently change their constitution, which would “in a great measure, deprive the government of that veneration which time bestows on everything, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability.” Experiments in the system of government were “of too ticklish a nature to be unnecessarily multiplied.” It was dangerous to “disturb the public tranquility by interesting too strongly the public passions.”
― Michael J. Klarman, The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution

“leading Massachusetts Antifederalist Elbridge Gerry, who had also been an important dissenting delegate at the Philadelphia convention, noted that “however respectable the members may be who signed the Constitution, it must be admitted that a free people are the proper guardians of their rights and liberties—that the greatest men may err—and that their errors are sometimes of the greatest magnitude”
― Michael J. Klarman, The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution

“Many Antifederalists additionally favored prohibiting Congress from disarming the people, warning that once the national government monopolized military force, it would rule supreme and the states would be destroyed”
― Michael J. Klarman, The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution

“Mason also objected that permitting the president to grant pardons even in cases of treason was dangerous because he might pardon crimes “which were advised by himself.”
― Michael J. Klarman, The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution

“Preachers delivered sermons on the Constitution, pro and con.”
― Michael J. Klarman, The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution