Alexander Hamilton Quotes

A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.

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.

I suppose this [Watergate] is an example of the dangers of letting down your guard against increased executive powers–no matter what the circumstances. Not that the danger was not real, but in this case the risk of the remedy was as great as the disease. There was a willingness to accept without challenge the Executive's claim to increased power. That's why we acted as we did, and it was a mistake.

No government, be it the most perfect, can stand without strong executive authority.

We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens.

For more than 500 years -- since the rise of nation-states and parliaments -- a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.

In France, executive power dominates much more than in Anglo-Saxon countries

The President wants to avoid being a lame duck. He’s trying not to limp and quack at the same time.

There is a substantial difference between the President being able to wave to the crowd from a hospital window and being able to govern.

The most important benefit that I can confer on the country by my Presidency is to insist upon the entire independence of the executive and legislative branches of government

Foreign policy is always a sticking point between Congress and the executive.

[Congress is] the chief aggrandizer of the Executive.

... the opinion of the Supreme Court ... ought not to control the co-ordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court, must each be guided by its own opinion of the constitution.

I am well aware of what three past presidents have said, but that will not be worth five cents if the people and the Congress do not support their president now.”

The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it.

We have the President assuming powers that are never going to end.

[I am] against giving the power of war to the Executive, because [he is] not safely to be trusted with it.

A unity of the Executive would be necessary in order to promote dispatch; -that a plurality of Persons would never do. When I was in Holland the States general were obliged to give up their power to a French Man to direct their military operations…. However power is always increasing on the part of the Executive

The powers conferred by the Constitution upon the Executive enable him to shape the foreign policy of this nation almost independent of the Legislature. A scheming and unscrupulous President can involve the country in serious complications, commit it to an unwise policy, or at least render its foreign diplomacy ridiculous before Congress may have an opportunity to check him.

The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good and bad times … the President's power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a law-maker.

In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. ... War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. ... It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace

In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body.

It may be said, indeed, that the Constitution has given to the Executive the power to annul the acts of the legislative body by refusing to them his assent.

Every president needs an S. O. B.

It was not revolution as men are prone to say. It was a popular expansion of governmental powers beyond all constitutional grants; and nearly all men everywhere hope the President may succeed.