"...a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters."

"[W]hen we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution of the United States, we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and has cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago."

Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Holland v. Missouri (1920), as quoted by Judge Margot Botsford in McDuffy v. Secretary of the Executive Office of Education (1993)