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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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A powerful, victorious ally is yet another name for master.
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The Christian Constitutional Society, its object is first: The support of the Christian religion. Second: The support of the United States.
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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.
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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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I would die to preserve the law upon a solid foundation but take away liberty, and the foundation is destroyed.
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The love for our native land strengthens our individual and national character.
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A garden, you know, is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician. Accordingly, I have purchased a few acres about nine miles from town, have built a house, and am cultivating a garden.
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A government, the constitution of which renders it unfit to be trusted with all the powers which a free people ought to delegate to any government, would be an unsafe and improper depositary of the NATIONAL INTERESTS.
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The genius of the people will ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws.
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I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.
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If government is in the hands of the few, they will tyrannize the many if in the hands of the many, they will tyrannize over the few. It ought to be in the hands of both, and be separated...they will need a mutual check. This check is a monarch.
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Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep.
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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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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
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Those who have a tolerable knowledge of human nature will not stand in need of such lights.
Alexander Hamilton
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It is astonishing that so simple a truth should ever have had an adversary and it is one among a multitude of proofs, how apt a spirit of ill-informed jealousy, or of too great abstraction and refinement is to lead men astray from the plainest paths of reason and conviction.
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Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.
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In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.
Alexander Hamilton
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. . . [The Judicial Branch] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.
Alexander Hamilton
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The principal purposes to be answered by union are these the common defense of the members the preservation of the public peace as well against internal convulsions as external attacks the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States the superintendence of our intercourse, political and commercial, with foreign countries.
Alexander Hamilton