Leadership Quote by Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton is diagnosing a stubborn, embarrassingly human kind of “principle”: the reflex to sabotage what you didn’t get to author. On the surface, it reads like political advice. Underneath, it’s a warning about ego masquerading as ideology - and a preemptive defense of any ambitious project that draws fire not for its merits, but for its parentage.

The line works because it shifts the frame from policy to psychology. Hamilton isn’t debating the thing itself; he’s delegitimizing the motives of its opponents. “No agency in planning it” is the tell: people want authorship, not outcomes. If they weren’t in the room, they’ll call the room corrupt. The second clause sharpens the blade: opposition can be less about substance than tribal disgust. “Those whom they dislike” is Hamilton’s genteel way of naming factionalism, personal rivalries, and status competition - the petty fuel that often powers grand rhetoric.

Context matters. In the early American republic, Hamilton was constantly pushing designs that required coordination, compromise, and centralized authority - a national bank, assumption of state debts, a stronger executive. These plans were easy to paint as elitist or monarchical, and Hamilton knew many attacks were as much about who got credit and control as about constitutional theory. The quote is simultaneously an observation and a tactic: if you can expose opposition as wounded pride, you make resistance look small, even childish, and you buy legitimacy for the architects of the state.