Quotes About Politics

The financial turmoil on Wall Street and the William Duer debacle pointed up a glaring defect in Hamilton's political theory: the rich could put their own interests above the national interest.

factions can become "potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.

Nevertheless, it frustrated him that after this exhaustive investigation his opponents still rehashed the stale charges of misconduct. He had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that "no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false." If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end "that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.

It turned out that before he had stalked Garfield, Charles Guiteau had stalked Grant.

Washington and other founders entertained the fanciful hope that America would be spared the bane of political parties, which they called "factions" and associated with parochial self-interest.

Hamilton alone seemed resigned as the end neared. At one point, speaking of politics, he said, "If they break this union, they will break my heart."69 He could have left no more fitting political epitaph.

Despite Grant's best efforts at Appomattox, the breach of the Civil War never healed but became deeply embedded in American political culture.

the government must degenerate either into an absolute and despotic monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.

In other words, Julia still believed in the beneficial effects of tobacco long after her husband had likely died from it. Even grimacing with pain, Grant tracked presidential politics intently.

Rather than make peace with John Adams, he was ready, if necessary, to blow up the Federalist party and let Jefferson become president.

Mirabeau, the French revolutionary politician, once observed of Talleyrand that he "would sell his soul for money and he would be right, for he would be exchanging dung for gold."32 Napoleon expressed this sentiment more concisely, calling Talleyrand "a pile of shit in a silk stocking.

he worried that a separate senate, elected solely by propertied voters, will "degenerate into a body purely aristocratical.

By 1872, under Grant's leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideology.)

At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States.

The world of politics was filled with duplicitous people and Grant was poorly equipped to spot them, remaining an easy victim for crooked men. "They studied Grant, some of them, as the shoemaker measures the foot of his customer," wrote George Hoar.

old Abe is through with his next four years, we will put him [i.e., Grant]

Hamilton warned that "a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

He recoiled at the cowardice and selfishness he saw rampant in the New York legislature. "The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people," he told Morris. "In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly." Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democracy, of politicians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would enlighten the people and exercise their own judgment.

The Federalist has been extolled as both a literary and political masterpiece. Theodore Roosevelt commented "that it is on the whole the greatest book" dealing with practical politics.

Grant had overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, and had garnered the largest popular majority of the century, nearly 56 percent of the vote, the biggest percentage between Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt.

With a presidential election in the offing, Grant was drawn into a controversy over whether soldiers in the field should be allowed to cast ballots.

Patrick Henry, the leading antifederalist, warned delegates who supported the Constitution, "They'll free your niggers.

April 12, 1790, the House voted down Hamilton's assumption plan, thirty-one to twenty-nine, and two weeks later voted to discontinue all debate on the issue. By early June, it looked as if the assumption plan was heading for oblivion. So Hamilton began to search for a compromise that would salvage the linchpin of his economic program.