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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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Alexander Hamilton
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More quotes by Alexander Hamilton

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Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct, that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?
Alexander Hamilton
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Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.
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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As to Taxes, they are evidently inseparable from Government. It is impossible without them to pay the debts of the nation, to protect it from foreign danger, or to secure individuals from lawless violence and rapine.
Alexander Hamilton
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A promise must never be broken.
Alexander Hamilton
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The laws of Congress are restricted to a certain sphere, and when they depart from this sphere, they are no longer supreme or binding.
Alexander Hamilton
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The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.
Alexander Hamilton
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One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are.
Alexander Hamilton
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The reasonableness of the agency of the national courts in cases in which the state tribunals cannot be supposed to be impartial, speaks for itself. No man ought certainly to be a judge in his own cause, or in any cause in respect to which he has the least interest or bias.
Alexander Hamilton
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Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions.
Alexander Hamilton
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[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes - rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments.
Alexander Hamilton
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A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care, and to the complete execution of the trusts for which it is responsible, free from every other control but a regard to the public good and to the sense of the people.
Alexander Hamilton
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The genius of the people will ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws.
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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[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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These powers ought to exist without limitation, because it is impossible to foresee or to define the extent and variety of national exigencies, and the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them.
Alexander Hamilton
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Self-preservation is the first principle of our nature.
Alexander Hamilton
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Its objects are CONTRACTS with foreign nations which have the force of law, but derive it from the obligations of good faith.
Alexander Hamilton
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To watch the progress of such endeavors is the office of a free press. To give us early alarm and put us on our guard against encroachments of power. This then is a right of utmost importance, one for which, instead of yielding it up, we ought rather to spill our blood.
Alexander Hamilton
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In the main it will be found that a power over a man's support [salary] is a power over his will.
Alexander Hamilton