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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 799fc9d | Hamilton wanted to restrain abusive majorities and minorities. | Ron Chernow | ||
| ffbe892 | 1690, the first capital, Jamestown, was swallowed whole by the sea during an | Ron Chernow | ||
| 51b56b2 | 1755, Knox decided to propagate the gospel and was sent | Ron Chernow | ||
| 446a297 | With an exalted sense of his place in history, he viewed himself as a potential savior of the republic. He once told a friend, "Perhaps my sensibility is the effect of an exaggerated estimate of my services to the U[nited] States, but on such a subject every man will judge for himself." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 7736f1e | pernicious; | Ron Chernow | ||
| e5efd4a | Poison-pen artists on both sides wrote vitriolic essays that were overtly partisan, often paid scant heed to accuracy, and sought a visceral impact. The | Ron Chernow | ||
| 452c2e8 | As after any revolution, purists were vigilant for signs of ideological backsliding and departures from the one true faith. The 1780s and 1790s were to be especially rich in feverish witch hunts for traitors who allegedly sought to reverse the verdict of the war. For the radicals of the day, revolutionary purity meant a strong legislature that would overshadow a weak executive and judiciary. For Hamilton, this could only invite legislative .. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 7dfa6e1 | The 1800 triumph of Republicanism also meant the ascendancy of the slaveholding south. Three Virginia slaveholders--Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe--were to control the White House for the next twenty-four years. These aristocratic exponents of "democracy" not only owned hundreds of human beings but profited from the Constitution's least democratic features: the legality of slavery and the ability of southern states to count three-fifths of .. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 8187e03 | Also, by having autonomous conventions approve the Constitution, the new republic would derive its legitimacy not from the statehouses but directly from the citizenry, enabling federal law to supersede state legislation. With | Ron Chernow | ||
| 9899021 | No etiquette yet defined civilized behavior between the parties. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 48f7659 | On January 21, 1793, more grisly events forced a reappraisal of the notion that the French Revolution was a romantic Gallic variant of the American Revolution. Louis XVI--who had aided the American Revolution and whose birthday had long been celebrated by American patriots--was guillotined for plotting against the Revolution. The death of Louis Capet--he had lost his royal title--was drenched in gore: schoolboys cheered, threw their hats al.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| e90d7a4 | At this, Hamilton dropped any pose of civility and chastised Monroe, saying "your representation is totally false." | Ron Chernow | ||
| b76e9eb | No American was to expend more prophetic verbiage in denouncing the French Revolution than Alexander Hamilton. The suspension of the monarchy and the September Massacres, Hamilton later told Lafayette, had "cured me of my goodwill for the French Revolution." 20 Hamilton refused to condone the carnage in Paris or separate means from ends. He did not think a revolution should cast off the past overnight or repudiate law, order, and tradition... | Ron Chernow | ||
| 4eeefdf | With the Neutrality Proclamation, Hamilton continued to define his views on American foreign policy: that it should be based on self-interest, not emotional attachment; that the supposed altruism of nations often masked baser motives; that individuals sometimes acted benevolently, but nations seldom did. This austere, hardheaded view of human affairs likely dated to Hamilton's earliest observations of the European powers in the West Indies... | Ron Chernow | ||
| e5668bc | 80-82 Jane Street. Taken to a large, second-floor bedroom, Alexander Hamilton was never to emerge from the house. | Ron Chernow | ||
| d738de8 | Hamilton's first act in Philadelphia paid homage to Franklin. The sage had opposed salaries for executive-branch officers, hoping such a measure would produce civic-minded leaders, not government officials feeding at the public trough. Others | Ron Chernow | ||
| 36e9ebf | demagogue. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 87a827b | If Jefferson enunciated the more ample view of political democracy, Hamilton possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity. He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit. We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 51ac97a | I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults or remove the prejudices which are imbibed against him. | self-improvement | Ron Chernow | |
| e9fbc99 | It is the food of my hopes, the object of my wishes, the only enjoyment of my life" - Alexander Hamilton" | Ron Chernow | ||
| 906a14d | It was all very pleasant and balmy, supremely beautiful and languid, if you were white, were rich, and turned a blind eye to the black population expiring in the canebrakes. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 9bb52e3 | 23 Destiny had now conferred upon Washington a pivotal place in | Ron Chernow | ||
| bedf43a | along with | Ron Chernow | ||
| f4c16fc | warrior | Ron Chernow | ||
| 61206d5 | On March 15, Washington addressed the officers, determined to squash a reported scheme to march on Congress. For the first time, he confronted a hostile audience of his own men. Washington sternly rebuked talk of rebellion, saying it would threaten the liberties for which they had fought. An insurrection would only "open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood." He then staged the most famous coup de theatre of.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 6a9878e | The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends. In a moment of acute anxiety a year earlier, John Adams had wondered what would happen if "the multitude, the vulgar, the herd, the rabble" maintained such open defiance of authority." | Ron Chernow | ||
| d5f540f | Clearly, the U.S. government condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial espionage. Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind the piracy of British trade secrets. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 981e0d3 | Only a free press could check abuses of executive power, Hamilton asserted. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 03c9e9d | When Franklin suggested on June 28th that each session start with a prayer for heavenly help, Hamilton countered that this might foster a public impression that embarrassments and dissensions within the convention had suggested this measure. According to legend, Hamilton also rebutted Franklin with the jest that the convention didn't need "foreign aid." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 5b21d14 | Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles. In | Ron Chernow | ||
| 73ee06f | If Madison in the 1780s was a philosopher king, Madison in the 1790s was a formidable practicing politician, and so skillful at cutting deals that he was dubbed "the big knife"." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 5e0fc3c | Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 193630a | Tis only to consult our own hearts to be convinced that nations like individuals revolt at the idea of being guided by external compulsion. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 3ea6094 | When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 31b8328 | There are some people whom the Lord Almighty cannot save," he later said wearily of the Oil Creek refiners. "They don't want to be saved. They want to go on and serve the devil and keep on in their wicked ways."4" | Ron Chernow | ||
| fb7393a | He sometimes represented poor people in criminal cases on a pro bono basis or was paid with just a barrel of ham. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 916145b | Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 0d61026 | The panic was blamed on many factors--tight money, Roosevelt's Gridiron Club speech attacking the "malefactors of great wealth," and excessive speculation in copper, mining, and railroad stocks. The immediate weakness arose from the recklessness of the trust companies. In the early 1900s, national and most state-chartered banks couldn't take trust accounts (wills, estates, and so on) but directed customers to trusts. Traditionally, these ha.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| a7aa912 | Alexander McDougall, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and other chieftains of the Sons of Liberty. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 1a78883 | By the time of "A Full Vindication," Hamilton had clearly assumed the coloring of his environment." | Ron Chernow | ||
| a66e9fa | Jefferson inwardly reviled Hamilton as a traitor to republican government. "What a fatal stroke at the cause of liberty; et tu Brute," he wrote in his diary." | Ron Chernow | ||
| fc7a3f1 | The residence law that passed Congress in July 1790, establishing Philadelphia as the interim capital, dictated that all government offices relocate there by early December. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 146839c | With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 1638b2c | Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things ... fail because we lack concentration--the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?"9 Rockefeller" | Ron Chernow |