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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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Alexander Hamilton
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More quotes by Alexander Hamilton

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It is far more rational to suppose that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.
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The honor of a nation is its life. Deliberately to abandon it is to commit an act of political suicide.
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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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The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of their political cares.
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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.
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The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.
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Nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties.
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The multitude . . . have not a sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them. . . . It is not safe to trust to the virtue of any people.
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But might not his [the president's] nomination be overruled? I grant it might, yet this could only be to make place for another nomination by himself. The person ultimately appointed must be object of his preference, though perhaps not in the first degree. It is also not very probable that his nomination would often be overruled.
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Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.
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To all general purposes we have uniformly been one people each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection.
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It was remarked yesterday that a numerous representation was necessary to obtain the confidence of the people. This is not generally true. The confidence of the people will easily be gained by a good administration. This is the true touchstone.
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And as the vicissitudes of Nations beget a perpetual tendency to the accumulation of debt, there ought to be in every government a perpetual, anxious, and unceasing effort to reduce that, which at any times exists, as fast as shall be practicable consistently with integrity and good faith.
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[T]here is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution.
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War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence, by perserverance, by time, and by practice.
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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.
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There can be no time, no state of things, in which Credit is not essential to a Nation.
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Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.
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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 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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