“[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots”

“Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli.”

“All well and good, but for our purposes these otherwise-valuable insights are mere subplots almost designed to carry us down side trails while blithely humming a tune about the rough equivalence of forests and trees.”

“But if insecurity was the primal source of Hamilton's incredibly energy, one would have to conclude that providence had conspired to produce at the most opportune moment perhaps the most creative liability in American history.”

“Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.”

“The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par—that is, the full value of the government’s original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. What’s more, the release of Hamilton’s plan produced...”

“Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.”