Quote

Establish that a Government may decline a provision for its debts, though able to make it, and you overthrow all public morality, you unhinge all the principles that must preserve the limits of free constitutions.

Alexander Hamilton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alexander Hamilton
Make
Principles
Establish
Public
Preserve
Though
Decline
Free
Preserves
Government
Debt
Constitutions
May
Morality
Overthrow
Able
Constitution
Debts
Must
Limits
Provision

More quotes by Alexander Hamilton

Image
It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
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
Image
Experience is the oracle of truth and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
[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
Image
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.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
[Imeachable conduct is] misconduct by public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Self-preservation is the first principle of our nature.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
Were it not that it might require too long a discussion, it would not be difficult to demonstrate that a large and well-organized republic can scarcely lose its liberty from any other cause than that of anarchy, to which a contempt of the laws is the high-road.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
...that standing army can never be formidable (threatening) to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in the use of arms.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
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
Image
The obscurity is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
The Courts must declare the sense of the law and if they should be disposed to exercise will instead of judgement the consequences would be the substitution of their pleasure for that of the legislative body.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
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
Image
Such a wife as I want... must be young, handsome I lay most stress upon a good shape, sensible a little learning will do, well-bread, chaste, and tender. As to religion, a moderate stock will satisfy me. She must believe in God and hate a saint.
Alexander Hamilton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government.
Alexander Hamilton