1089 – Alexander Hamilton on a President Betraying the Nation for Their Own Benefit

“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.”

-Alexander Hamilton

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1087 – “To the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.”

-James Madison, 4th President of the United States of America

1052 – “As the United States is the freest of all nations, so, too, its people sympathize with all people struggling for liberty and self-government; but while so sympathizing it is due to our honor that we should abstain from enforcing our views upon unwilling nations and from taking an interested part, without invitation, in the quarrels between different nations or between governments and their subjects. Our course should always be in conformity with strict justice and law, international and local.”

-Ulysses S Grant, 18ht President of the United States of America

971 – “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

-John F Kennedy, 35th President of the United States of America

948 – Andrew Jackson on The USA Constitution

“We have now lived almost fifty years under the Constitution framed by the sages and patriots of the Revolution. … We have had our seasons of peace and of war, with all the evils which precede or follow a state of hostility with powerful nations. We encountered these trials with our Constitution yet in its infancy, and under the disadvantages which a new and untried government must always feel when it is called upon to put forth its whole strength without the lights of experience to guide it or the weight of precedents to justify its measures. But we have passed triumphantly through all these difficulties. Our Constitution is no longer a doubtful experiment, and at the end of nearly half a century we find that it has preserved unimpaired the liberties of the people, secured the rights of property, and that our country has improved and is flourishing beyond any former example in the history of nations.”

-Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United States of America [See Source Notes for context]

929 – The Monroe Doctrine

“We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere, but with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

-James Monroe, 5th President of the United States

893 – “In conclusion I congratulate you, my fellow-citizens, upon the high state of prosperity to which the goodness of Divine Providence has conducted our common country. Let us invoke a continuance of the same protecting care which has led us from small beginnings to the eminence we this day occupy.”

-Zachary Taylor, 12th President of the United States of America

Happy 243rd Birthday to the United States of America!

892 – “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”

–Harry Truman, 33rd President of the United States of America

825 – “History shows that no Administration from the time of Washington to the present has been free from … mistakes. I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.”

–Ulysses S Grant, 18th President of the United States of America

823 – “The Government is here to serve, but it cannot replace individual service. And shouldn’t all of us who are public servants also set an example of service as private citizens? … Ours should be a nation characterized by conspicuous compassion, generosity that is overflowing and abundant.”

–George H W Bush, 41st President of the United States