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Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.

Alexander Hamilton

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More quotes by Alexander Hamilton

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The experience of treaties being broken with impunity provide an afflicting lesson to mankind how little dependence is to be placed on treaties which have no other sanction than the obligations of good faith and which oppose general considerations of peace and justice to the impulse of any immediate interest and passion.
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To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.
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Tyranny has perhaps oftener grown out of the assumptions of power, called for, on pressing exigencies, by a defective constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.
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[If you understood the natural rights of mankind,] [y]ou would be convinced that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that, and cannot be wrested from any people without the most manifest violation of justice.
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The praise of a civilized world is justly due to Christianity—war, by the influence of the humane principles of that religion, has been stripped of half its horrors. The French renounce Christianity, and they relapse into barbarism—war resumes the same hideous and savage form which it wore in the ages of Gothic and Roman violence.
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A LAW, by the very meaning of the term, includes supremacy. It is a rule which those to whom it is prescribed are bound to observe. This results from every political association.
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Here, sir, the people govern here they act by their immediate representatives.
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The Convention probably foresaw what it has been a principal aim of these papers to inculcate that the danger which most threatens our political welfare is, that the state governments will finally sap the foundations of the Union.
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It is the Press which has corrupted our political morals - and it is to the Press we must look for the means of our political regeneration.
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Every nation ought to have a right to provide for its own happiness.
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It is a general principle of human nature, that a man will be interested in whatever he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it.
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Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society.
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The laws of certain states . . . give an ownership in the service of Negroes as personal property . . . . But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty - and when the captor in war . . . thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.
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Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions.
Alexander Hamilton
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The idea of restraining the legislative authority, in the means of providing for the national defense, is one of those refinements which owe their origin to a zeal for liberty more ardent than enlightened.
Alexander Hamilton
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People sometimes attribute my success to my genius all the genius I know anything about is hard work.
Alexander Hamilton
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I expect we shall be told, that the Militia of the country is its natural bulwark, and would be at all times equal to the national defence...The facts, which from our own experience forbid a reliance of this kind, are too recent to permit us to be the dupes of such a suggestion.
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Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.
Alexander Hamilton
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Law is defined to be a rule of action but how can that be a rule, which is little known and less fixed?
Alexander Hamilton
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The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.
Alexander Hamilton