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Constitutions should consist only of general provisions the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

Alexander Hamilton

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Alexander Hamilton
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These powers ought to exist without limitation, because it is impossible to foresee or to define the extent and variety of national exigencies, and the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them.
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It is one thing to be subordinate to the laws, and another [for the Executive] to be dependent on the legislative body. The first comports with, the last violates, the fundamental principles of good government and, whatever may be the forms of the Constitution, unites all power in the same hands.
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The true principle of a republic is that the people should choose whom they please to govern them. Representation is imperfect, in proportion as the current of popular favor is checked. The great source of free government, popular election, should be perfectly pure, and the most unbounded liberty allowed.
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Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.
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CREDIT supposes specific and permanent funds for the punctual payment of interest, with a moral certainty of a final redemption of the principal.
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The local interest of a State ought in every case to give way to the interests of the Union. For when a sacrifice of one or the other is necessary, the former becomes only an apparent, partial interest, and should yield, on the principle that the smaller good ought never to oppose the greater good.
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Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.
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[I]n framing a Government for a nation we ought, in those provisions which are designed to be permanent, to calculate not on temporary, but on permanent causes of expence.
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It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.
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How can you trust people who are poor and own no property? ... Inequality of property will exist as long as liberty exists.
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A fondness for power is implanted in most men, and it is natural to abuse it when acquired.
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If the Constitution is adopted (and it was) the Union will be in fact and in theory an association of States or a Confederacy.
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The system is the best that the present views and circumstances of the country will permit.
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The increasing remoteness of consanguinity is everyday diminishing the force of the family compact between France and Spain. And politicians have ever with great reason considered the ties of blood as feeble and precarious links of political connection.
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To look for a continuation in harmony between a number of independent unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.
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Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep.
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Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.
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Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
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Opinion, whether well or ill-founded, is the governing principle of human affairs
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... for it is a truth, which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are commonly most in danger when the means of insuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.
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