Quote

Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. To be more safe, [nations] at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.

Alexander Hamilton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alexander Hamilton
Nations
Safety
Powerful
National
Free
Directors
Less
Danger
Federalist
Running
Safe
Conduct
Become
Risk
External
Willing
Length
Liberty
Director

More quotes by Alexander Hamilton

Image
These are not vague inferences . . . but they are solid conclusions drawn from the natural and necessary progress of human affairs.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
People sometimes attribute my success to my genius all the genius I know anything about is hard work.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
This process of election affords a moral certainty that the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any many who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
The power of creating new funds upon new objects of taxation, by its own authority, would enable the national government to borrow as far as its necessities might require.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
To all general purposes we have uniformly been one people each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
The honor of a nation is its life. Deliberately to abandon it is to commit an act of political suicide.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
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.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of violent love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is too apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten, that the vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
[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.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence, by perserverance, by time, and by practice.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am a sinner. I look to Him for mercy pray for me.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
I trust that the proposed Constitution afford a genuine specimen of representative government and republican government and that it will answer, in an eminent degree, all the beneficial purposes of society.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
Americans rouse - be unanimous, be virtuous, be firm, exert your courage, trust in Heaven, and nobly defy the enemies both of God and man!
Alexander Hamilton
Image
Divide et impera must be the motto of every nation that either hates or fears us.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
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.
Alexander Hamilton