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I would die to preserve the law upon a solid foundation but take away liberty, and the foundation is destroyed.

Alexander Hamilton

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Alexander Hamilton
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More quotes by Alexander Hamilton

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The propriety of a law, in a constitutional light, must always be determined by the nature of the powers upon which it is founded.
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There can be no time, no state of things, in which Credit is not essential to a Nation.
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Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.
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The Liberty of the press consists in the right to publish with impunity truth with good motives for justifiable ends, though reflecting on government, magistracy, or individuals.
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When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.
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Divide et impera must be the motto of every nation that either hates or fears us.
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In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.
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To my utter astonishment I saw an airship descending over my cow lot. It was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said.
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Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.
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When human laws contradict or discountenance the means, which are necessary to preserve the essential rights of any society, they defeat the proper end of all laws, and so become null and void.
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If the exercise of power of internal taxation by the Union should be discovered on experiment to be really inconvenient, the federal government may then forbear the use of it . . .
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Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.
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Wherever indeed a right of property is infringed for the general good, if the nature of the case admits of compensation, it ought to be made but if compensation be impracticable, that impracticability ought to be an obstacle to a clearly essential reform.
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It is presumable that no country will be able to borrow of foreigners upon better terms than the United States, because none can, perhaps, afford so good security.
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But might not his [the president's] nomination be overruled? I grant it might, yet this could only be to make place for another nomination by himself. The person ultimately appointed must be object of his preference, though perhaps not in the first degree. It is also not very probable that his nomination would often be overruled.
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The same rule that teaches the propriety of a partition between the various branches of power, teaches us likewise that this partition ought to be so contrived as to render the one independent of the other.
Alexander Hamilton
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If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.
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Nothing is more natural to men in office, than to look with peculiar deference towards that authority to which they owe their official existence.
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The variety of more minute interests, which will necessarily fall under the superintendence of the local administrations . . . cannot be particularized without involving a detail too tedious and uninteresting to compensate for the instruction it might afford.
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The experience of past ages may inform us, that when the circumstances of a people render them distressed, their rulers generally recur to severe, cruel, and oppressive measures. Instead of endeavoring to establish their authority in the affection of their subjects, they think they have no security but in their fear.
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