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The same rule that teaches the propriety of a partition between the various branches of power, teaches us likewise that this partition ought to be so contrived as to render the one independent of the other.

Alexander Hamilton

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Alexander Hamilton
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The system is the best that the present views and circumstances of the country will permit.
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This power ought to be coextensive with all the possible combinations of such circumstances and ought to be under the direction of the same councils which are appointed to preside over the common defense.
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When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.
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The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people. In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.
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Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government and to admit of a probability at least, of their feeling a real interest in our affairs.
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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.
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In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
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Nothing is more natural to men in office, than to look with peculiar deference towards that authority to which they owe their official existence.
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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.
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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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To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude, that the fiery and destructive passions of war, reign in the human breast, with much more powerful sway, than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace.
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The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.
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Every nation ought to have a right to provide for its own happiness.
Alexander Hamilton
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What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statutes the next.
Alexander Hamilton
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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.
Alexander Hamilton
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Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.
Alexander Hamilton
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The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subject to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights and by degrees, the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors.
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 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.
Alexander Hamilton
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If we are in earnest about giving the Union energy and duration we must abandon the vain project of legislating upon the States in their collective capacities.
Alexander Hamilton