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Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation. (Alexander Hamilton, July 1792)
Many mickles make a muckle.
As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.
Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed” and “A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.
Hamilton, the human word machine,
If Washington expected relief from Hamilton badgering him for an appointment, he soon learned otherwise. Hamilton was fully prepared to become a pest.
The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained,
A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.
Robert Troup said that Hamilton rejected fees if they were larger than he thought warranted and generally favored arbitration or amicable settlements in lieu of lawsuits.
Willful waste makes woeful want.
Noah Webster contended that Hamilton’s “ambition, pride, and overbearing temper” had destined him “to be the evil genius of this country.
After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.
Washington must have seen that Hamilton, for all his brains and daring, sometimes lacked judgment and had to be supervised carefully.
With a ready tongue and rapier wit, Hamilton could wound people more than he realized, and he was so nimble in debate that even bright people sometimes felt embarrassingly tongue-tied in his presence.
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.
Rockefeller equated silence with strength: Weak men had loose tongues and blabbed to reporters, while prudent businessmen kept their own counsel.
One story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that when Hamilton was asked why the framers omitted the word God from the Constitution, he replied, “We forgot.
Like most people, Hamilton and Adams were preternaturally sensitive to flaws in the other that they themselves possessed.
In early July 1777, Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York fell to the British, prompting King George III to clap his hands and exclaim, “I have beat them! Beat all the Americans.
It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.
Abigail Adams, who did not set sail until November, seemed miffed by the enforced southward shift, swearing that she would try to enjoy Philadelphia but that “when all is done it will not be Broadway.
Another female observer found Madison entertaining in private but “mute, cold, and repulsive” in company.
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.
This, I confess, hurts my feelings, and if it obtains credit will require a contradiction,
The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.
The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee,” he once said, “and I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.
