Faith & Spirit Quote by Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton is doing something deliberately unfashionable in a revolutionary age: puncturing the sanctity of popular opinion. The phrase he targets, "the voice of the people...the voice of God", wasn’t just a quaint proverb; it was political lubricant, a way to baptize majority will as moral truth. Hamilton refuses the baptism. He frames the maxim as a comforting superstition - widely repeated, therefore widely trusted - and then snaps it back to "fact", as if democracy has been living on vibes.

The line works because it’s less an insult than an argument for design. "Turbulent and changing" is not merely a complaint about crowds; it’s a diagnosis of volatility as a structural feature of mass politics. People are not wicked, they’re swayed: by rumor, fear, faction, charismatic speakers, economic stress. "They seldom judge or determine right" is a warning about how quickly public judgment can become public appetite, and how appetite, once flattered, demands to be fed.

Context matters: Hamilton is writing in the shadow of unstable confederation government and the memory of mob violence, debt unrest, and state-level improvisation that looked, to him, like the republic eating itself. The subtext is Federalist to the core: legitimacy cannot rest on raw majorities alone. It needs buffers - institutions, representation, constraints - not to silence the people, but to slow them down, force deliberation, and prevent temporary passions from hardening into permanent injustice. Hamilton isn’t anti-democratic so much as anti-romantic about democracy.