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As the duties of superintending the national defense and of securing the public peace against foreign or domestic violence involve a provision for casualties and dangers to which no possible limits can be assigned, the power of making that provision ought to know no other bounds than the exigencies of the nation and the resources of the community.

Alexander Hamilton

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Alexander Hamilton
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More quotes by Alexander Hamilton

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Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
Alexander Hamilton
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Every nation ought to have a right to provide for its own happiness.
Alexander Hamilton
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The powers contained in a constitution...ought to be construed liberally in advancement of the public good.
Alexander Hamilton
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The system is the best that the present views and circumstances of the country will permit.
Alexander Hamilton
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Hence, in a state of nature, no man had any moral power to deprive another of his life, limbs, property, or liberty nor the least authority to command or exact obedience from him, except that which arose from the ties of consanguinity.
Alexander Hamilton
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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.
Alexander Hamilton
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There are men who could neither be distressed nor won into a sacrifice of their duty but this stern virtue is the growth of few soils: And in the main it will be found, that a power over a man's support is a power over his will.
Alexander Hamilton
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An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good.
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.
Alexander Hamilton
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I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons entrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description. The regulation of the mere domestic police of a State appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition.
Alexander Hamilton
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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.
Alexander Hamilton
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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.
Alexander Hamilton
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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
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The citizens of America have too much discernment to be argued into anarchy. And I am much mistaken, if experience has not wrought a deep and solemn conviction in the public mind, that greater energy of government is essential to the welfare and prosperity of the community
Alexander Hamilton
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There can be no profit in the making or selling of things to be destroyed in war. Men may think that they have such profit, but in the end the profit will turn out to be a loss.
Alexander Hamilton
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[T]he Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. But this doctrine is not deducible from any circumstance peculiar to the plan of convention, but from the general theory of a limited Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton
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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.
Alexander Hamilton
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Ambition without principle never was long under the guidance of good sense.
Alexander Hamilton
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Has it not. . . invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility and justice?
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