evan price
Member
A few duplicates here but:
‘‘Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined’’
— Patrick Henry
‘‘The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.’’
— Patrick Henry
‘‘Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.’’
— Jefferson's "Commonplace Book," 1774-1776, quoting from On Crimes and Punishment, by criminologist Cesare Beccaria, 1764
‘‘No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms (within his own lands or tenements).’’
— Thomas Jefferson: Draft Virginia Constitution (with his note added), 1776. Papers 1:353
‘‘To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them...’’
— Richard Henry Lee, 1787
‘‘And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions.’’
— Samuel Adams, Debates of the Massachusetts Convention of 1788
‘‘[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.’’
— James Madison, Federalist, No. 46.
‘‘Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? ... If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?’’
— Patrick Henry
‘‘I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.’’
‘‘To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.’’
— George Mason
‘‘No slave shall keep any arms whatever, nor pass, unless with written orders from his master or employer, or in his company, with arms from one place to another. Arms in possession of a slave contrary to this prohibition shall be forfeited to him who will seize them.’’
— A Bill Concerning Slaves, Virginia Assembly, 1779
‘‘The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will lose.’’
— James Earl Jones, Actor
‘‘The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest possible limits. ... and [when] the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.’’
— St. George Tucker, Judge of the Virginia Supreme Court 1803
‘‘Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States’’
— Noah Webster, 1888
‘‘Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.’’
— Mahatma Ghandi, "Gandhi, An Autobiography", page 446
‘‘In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.’’
— Aristotle
‘‘Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State.’’
— Heinrich Himmler
‘‘We cannot be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.’’
— B.J.Clinton, USA Today, 3/11/93 page 2A
‘‘The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjected people to carry arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected peoples to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non ["something essential" lit. "without which not"] for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or police.’’
-- Adolph Hitler, Edict of March 18, 1938
‘‘We, the People are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts — not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert the Constitution.’’
— Abraham Lincoln
‘‘When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans ...... And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities.’’
— Bill Clinton, 3-22-94
‘‘ They, the makers of the Constitution: conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.’’
‘‘Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial ... the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding’’
— Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928
‘‘...for it is a truth, which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are commonly most in danger when the means of insuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.’’
— Alexander Hamilton
‘‘A government resting on the minority is an aristocracy, not a Republic, and could not be safe with a numerical and physical force against it, without a standing army, an enslaved press and a disarmed populace.’’
— James Madison, The Federalist Papers (No. 46).
‘‘It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.’’
— Justice Robert H. Jackson
‘‘The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man.’’
— attributed to Horatio Bunce in Sockdolager
‘‘You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.’’
— Charles A. Beard
‘‘Four out of five politicians surveyed prefer unarmed, ignorant peasants.’’
— Unknown
“A Canadian is sort of like an American, but without the gun”
Unknown
“The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.”
Richard Buckminster Fuller
“An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
Mae West
“In England, if you commit a crime, the police don't have a gun and you don't have a gun. If you commit a crime, the police will say "Stop, or I'll say stop again."”
Robin Williams
“A lot of the people who keep a gun at home for safety are the same ones who refuse to wear a seat belt”
George Carlin
“As long as there are guns, the individual that wants a gun for a crime is going to have one and going to get it.”
Ronald Reagan
“There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes.”
Katharine Whitehorn
“Every gun that's made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms...is spending the genius of its scientists, the sweat of its laborers,”
Dwight David Eisenhower
“Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.”
Ayn Rand