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One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are.

Alexander Hamilton

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Alexander Hamilton
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Divide et impera must be the motto of every nation that either hates or fears us.
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The system is the best that the present views and circumstances of the country will permit.
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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 there are such things as political axioms, the propriety of the judicial power of a government being co-extensive with its legislative, may be ranked among the number.
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In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.
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What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws.
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Take mankind in general, they are vicious-their passions may be operated upon.
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There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price or as the serious.
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Establish that a Government may decline a provision for its debts, though able to make it, and you overthrow all public morality, you unhinge all the principles that must preserve the limits of free constitutions.
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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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Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.
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When a government betrays the people by amassing too much power and becoming tyrannical, the people have no choice but to exercise their original right of self-defense — to fight the government.
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States, like individuals, who observe their engagements, are respected and trusted: while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct.
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A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious. . . . When conducted with magnanimity, justice and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.
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The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.
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Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.
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Common interest may always be reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy.
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No character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.
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Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution.
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The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased.
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