Quotes About Alexander Hamilton

“Mr. Herbert Demarest
Alexander Hamilton Jr. High
2236 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn NY
Dear Mr Demarest,
Then why don't you give him 'Withering Heights'? At least Heathcoat knew how to kick some ass.
Chas. Banks
3d Base”

— Steve Kluger

“Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

“Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation. (Alexander Hamilton, July 1792)”

— Ron Chernow

“[Philip's death was] beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life ... He was truly a fine youth. But why should I repine? It was the will of heaven and he is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity. (Alexander Hamilton letter to Benjamin Rush about the death of his 19-year old son from mortal wounds inflicted from a duel.)”

— Ron Chernow

“On August 26 the Assembly responded by conferring French citizenship upon Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Anacharsis Cloots, Johann Pestalozzi, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Friedrich Schiller, George Washington, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.”

— Will Durant

“The Jefferson of the cabinet, of the vice presidency, and of the presidency can be best understood by recalling that his passion for the people and his regard for republicanism belonged to a man who believed that there were forces afoot-forces visible and invisible, domestic and foreign-that sought to undermine the rights of man by reestablishing the rule of priests and nobles and kings. His opposition to John Adams and to Alexander Hamilton, to the British and to financial speculators, grew out of this fundamental concern. Like”

— Jon Meacham

“Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson hated each other so much. But that hate that they had for each other did not come before the love of their country.”

— David Scott

“Through the eight books in 'The Treasure Chest' series, readers will meet twins Maisie and Felix and learn the secrets and rules of time travel, where they will encounter some of these famous and forgotten people. In Book 1, Clara Barton, then Alexander Hamilton, Pearl Buck, Harry Houdini, and on and on.”

— Ann Hood

“Hating Wall Street is an American tradition that dates back even to the days when Thomas Jefferson cursed that money lover Alexander Hamilton. And for centuries, the complaints about it have largely stayed the same: 'It does nothing! It creates chaos! It's a parasite that sucks hardworking Americans dry!'”

— Adam Davidson

“As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.”

— Edwin Meese

“The Congress has had an uneasy relationship with banks and bankers since Alexander Hamilton. It took the United States until 1913 to set up a central bank. The Federal Reserve earned its hard-won independence over years of effort.”

— Robert Zoellick

“Everybody knows that Alexander Hamilton was a founding father of the United States, a young father to be sure: only thirty at the time of the Constitutional Convention and just turned thirty-eight when he left behind his brilliant career as Secretary of the Treasury.”

— Edmund Morgan

“I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in 'We, the people.'”

— Barbara Jordan

“A fourth argument, one that was made by Alexander Hamilton and continues to be repeated down to the present, is that free trade would be fine if all other countries practiced free trade but that so long as they do not, the United States cannot afford to. This argument has no validity whatsoever, either in principle or in practice. Other countries that impose restrictions on international trade do hurt us. But they also hurt themselves. Aside from the three cases just considered, if we impose restrictions in turn, we simply add to the harm to ourselves and also harm them as well. Competition in masochism and sadism is hardly a prescription for sensible international economic policy! Far from leading to a reduction in restrictions by other countries, this kind of retaliatory action simply leads to further restrictions.”

— Milton Friedman

“Alexander Hamilton, of New York, a signer of the Constitution, was a member of the ratifying convention in his state and did more than any other member to wring the approval of the new instrument from delegates practically instructed by their constituents to vote against it.”

— Charles A. Beard

“For as Alexander Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist Papers nearly two centuries ago, A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”

— Henry Hazlitt

“The United States established itself as a trustworthy new nation in its first two decades after the Revolutionary War by paying its debts, even when many in the country believed it had no obligation to do so. Alexander Hamilton, the founder of this newspaper, insisted on it.”

— John Podhoretz

“Asked the boy to "consider himself at all times as one of his family." Washington was referring to his military family or aides-de-camp, the same way John Adams described the aide Alexander Hamilton as "one of General Washington's Family." So when Washington said "family," he meant "chummy minion." The orphaned Lafayette heard "son.”

— Sarah Vowell

“Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control - "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people.”

— Noam Chomsky

“If we are going to remove someone, which I have no problem with doing, then let's do the 20, not the 10, the very first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton.”

— James Lankford

“When I was asked to do a song from 'In the Heights' at the White House in 2009, I chose instead to do 'Alexander Hamilton' because I felt like I was meeting a moment.”

— Lin-Manuel Miranda

“There are few people who exemplify the ideals of opportunity, entrepreneurship and commitment to the collective good than the great New Yorker and the face of the $10 bill, Alexander Hamilton.”

— Eric Schneiderman

“Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.”

— Will Rogers

“Hamilton wanted to lead the electorate and provide expert opinion instead of consulting popular opinion. He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that pined for greater simplicity. Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses. Fisher Ames observed of Hamilton that the common people don't want leaders 'whom they see elevated by nature and education so far above their heads.”

— Ron Chernow

“You can look at founding father Alexander Hamilton nevertheless assuring - assuring - the countrymen in Federalist 78 that the role of the federal courts under the proposed Constitution would be limited.”

— Sam Brownback

“Alexander Hamilton has been on the $10 since 1928, he's been well honored by the country, he was a great Secretary of the Treasury. But of all the people on the currency, the only one who isn't a president.”

— Grover Norquist

“A mattoid is a miscreant who seeks to elevate himself by destroying society. Examples include the Rothschilds, David Rockefeller, Franklin Roosevelt, Meyer Lansky, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Hamilton, and Josef Stalin. Often mattoids are of high intelligence, tainted geniuses, despite their flawed character and lack of any morality.”

— Oliver Cromwell

“I was dupedby the Secretary of the treasury [Alexander Hamilton], and made a fool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned the deepest regret.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.”

— Gertrude Atherton

“Alexander Hamilton realized that warfare was part and parcel of human nature, and it's something we had to prepare for.”

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

“Alexander Hamilton originated the put and take system in our national treasury: the taxpayers put it in, and the politicians take it out”

— Will Rogers

“From Samuel Adams to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin to Alexander Hamilton, all the Founders intended religion to provide a moral anchor for our liberty in democracy.”

— William Bennett

“He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of the Public Credit, and it sprung upon its feet. The fabled birth of Minerva, from the brain of Jove, was hardly more sudden or more perfect than the financial system of the United States, as it burst forth from the conceptions of Alexander Hamilton.”

— Daniel Webster