Neither the wording of the amendment itself nor common practice challenged the widely held belief that government guaranteed freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
As an Indian, and now as a politician and a government minister, I've become rather concerned about the hype we're hearing about our own country, all this talk about India becoming a world leader, even the next superpower.
The question is: how bad do things have to get before you will do something about it? Where is your line in the sand? If you don't enforce the constitutional limitations on your government very soon, you are likely to find out what World War III will be like.
Many programs are built on the government's spending power, and the existence of an extraconstitutional limit on that power is a worrisome development.
Corruption is not the sole test of your worthiness to form the government.
Under no circumstances will I allow the Fianna Fail party back into government. They wrecked the economy twice.
While the seeming independence of the federal judiciary has played a vital part in making its actions virtual Holy Writ for the bulk of the people, it is also and ever true that the judiciary is part and parcel of the government apparatus and appointed by the executive and legislative branches.
You shouldn't change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing. If we sacrifice our values because we're afraid, we don't care very much about those values.
In 2011, when I established the activist group Scholarism, I could have not imagined that a year later, 100,000 people would take to the street and occupy for a week to urge the government to withdraw the national education curriculum.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
If our republican form of government is perishing because communications - the infrastructure of that republic - is under the yoke of international business how, at last, do we save it? We must build a confrontational movement to reclaim our democracy, a movement committed to active and sustained protest against the present order.
If younger people see older people who haven't planned ahead and have to rely on charity, the young will be more likely to provide for the future. Today when someone plans poorly, the only consequence people see is a demand for more government.
You are born free. I was born free. The government can take your freedom away, but it did not give you your freedom. It was your human right. The key part of that is you are free first.
In their zeal to show compassion, liberal community activists are quick to offer government handouts and, in the process, convey the message that people are incapable of making it on their own.
Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.