Alexander Hamilton Quotes

It is with your aid, as the people, that I think we shall be able to preserve - not the country, for the country will preserve itself, but the institutions of the country - those institutions which have made us free, intelligent and happy - the most free, the most intelligent, and the happiest people on the globe.

The important matter is freedom. When the people choose what they want, it is good for them and for us.

Laws are important precisely because in a democracy they reflect the attitudes and aspirations of those they govern.

This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people and for the people.

What is government itself but the great reflection of human nature.

The foundation upon which democracy rests is faith in the moral instincts of the people. Its ballot boxes, the franchise, its laws, and constitutions are but the outward manifestations of the deeper and more essential thing—a continuing trust in the moral purposes of the average man and woman.

It is a democratic fallacy to believe that people want to govern themselves. People only ask to be governed decently.

As force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as the most free and the most popular.

The touchstone of everything that can be concluded as a law for a people lies in the question whether the people could have imposed such a law on itself.

The people, have chosen to be governed under such and such principles. They have not chosen to be governed or proposed to submit upon any other.

America has shown how a free people can found a democracy shorn of all the terrors which for so many ages haunted the dreams of philosophers.

Democracy requires both discipline and hard work. It is not easy for individuals to govern themselves.... It is one thing to gain freedom, but no one can give you the right to self-government. This you must earn for yourself by long discipline.

Our courts and law, our on-going experiment in self-governance, these parts of our social fabric are precious.

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

Swaraj as conceived by me does not mean the end of kingship.

It is singular to look round upon a country where the dreams of sages, smiled at as utopian, seem distinctly realized, a people voluntarily submitting to laws of their own imposing, with arms in their hands respecting the voice of a government which their breath created and which their breath could in a moment destroy!

Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free, that civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against abuse of freedom.

What is this thing we call government? Is it anything but organized violence? The law orders you to obey, and if you don't obey, it will compel you by force - all governments, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or fear of punishment.

Does it seem to you impossible to imagine anything more inextricable than the social contract, when you think of the frightful number of relations that it must regulate -- something like squaring the circle, or finding perpetual motion? That is the reason why, wearied of the struggle, you fall back on absolutism and force.

In order that a people may be free, it is necessary that the governed be sages, and those who govern, gods.

After the signing of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman on the street, "What have you given us, sir?" Franklin Responded, "A Republic, if you can keep it." A critical moment in history has come; our Republic is in jeopardy. Can we keep it? If the answer to that question, as I fear, is "no," then we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.

If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.

With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries. What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural backround, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient.

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.