Great Quotes from the past and present


Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 479 (1928)


Hubert H. Humphrey

Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms. ... The right of the citizen to bear arms is just one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.


Thomas Jefferson

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical. When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.


Benjamin Franklin

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.


Noah Webster

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed.


Cesare Beccaria, 18th Century Italian Criminologist

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.


Niccolo Machiavelli

Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.


Mohandas Gandhi

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving the whole nation of arms as the blackest. I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.


George Mason

To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.


Adolf Hitler

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjected people to carry arms ...


Thomas Paine

It is the violence which is done and threatened to our persons, the destruction of our property by armed force, the invasion of our country by fire and sword which conscientiously qualifies the use of arms.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense ... Weakness allures the ruffian but arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world ... Horrid mischief would ensue were the good deprived of the use of them.


Eugene V. Debs

The protection the government owes you and fails to provide, you are morally bound to provide for yourselves ...


St. George Tucker, in his edition of Blackstone's "Commentaries"

The right of self-defense is the first law of nature ... 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.


Mark Twain

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.


Gary Conway

Why would anyone believe that a person who would ignore laws against murder, would obey gun laws ?







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