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Unless your government is respectable, foreigners will invade your rights and to maintain tranquillity you must be respectable even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Alexander Hamilton

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Alexander Hamilton
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The desire of reward is one of the strongest incentives of human conduct ... the best security for the fidelity of mankind is to make their interest coincide with their duty.
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The powers contained in a constitution...ought to be construed liberally in advancement of the public good.
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It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of violent love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is too apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten, that the vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty.
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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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A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.
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But the greatest obstacle of all to the successful prosecution of a new branch of industry in a country, in which it was before unknown, consists . . . in the bounties, premiums, and other aids which are granted, in a variety of cases, by the nations, in which the establishments to be imitated are previously introduced.
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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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The propriety of a law, in a constitutional light, must always be determined by the nature of the powers upon which it is founded.
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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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Take mankind in general, they are vicious-their passions may be operated upon.
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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.
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To presume a want of motives for such contests . . . would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.
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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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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.
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The law... dictated by God Himself is, of course, superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity if contrary to this.
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The Christian Constitutional Society, its object is first: The support of the Christian religion. Second: The support of the United States.
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Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.
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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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What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws.
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There is no position which depends on clearer principles than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.
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