" The framers also held that, though the Constitution's barriers against the abuse of power are indispensable, they were only "parchment barriers" and therefore could never be more than part of the answer. And in some ways they were the secondary part at that. The U.S. Constitution was never meant to be the sole bulwark of freedom, let alone a self-perpetuating machine that would go by itself. The American founders were not, in Joseph de Maistre's words, "poor men who imagine that nations can be constituted with ink."" Without strong ethics to support them, the best laws and the strongest institutions would only be ropes of sand.
Jefferson "

― Os Guinness , A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future