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.
In the general course of human nature, A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
Here, sir, the people govern; here they act by their immediate representatives.
The scheme of separate confederacies, which will always multiply the chances of ambition, will be a never failing bait to all such influential characters in the State administrations as are capable of preferring their own emolument and advancement to the public weal.
Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.
To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.
To answer the purpose of the adversaries of the Constitution, they ought to prove, not merely that particular provisions in it are not the best, which might have been imagined; but that the plan upon the whole is bad and pernicious.
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.
After an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America.
The great leading objects of the federal government, in which revenue is concerned, are to maintain domestic peace, and provide for the common defense.
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.
Effective resistance to usurpers is possible only provided the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them.
Those who do not industrialize become hewers of wood and hawkers of water.
This process of election affords a moral certainty that the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any many who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep.
To attempt to enumerate the complicated variety of mischiefs in the whole system of the social economy, which proceed from a neglect of the maxims that uphold public credit, and justify the solicitude manifested by the House on this point, would be an improper intrusion on their time and patience.
Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic; as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions.
The injury which may possibly be done by defeating a few good laws, will be amply compensated by the advantage of preventing a number of bad ones.
As to religion a moderate stock will satisfy me. She must believe in god and hate a saint.
The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge right or make good decision.