The fabric of American Empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of National power ought to flow immediately … - Alexander Hamilton

Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.

All the genius I have lives in this: when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded by it. Then the effort that I've made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of thought and labor.

An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the State to the acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue, which would make it wise in a Nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a Magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.