Category: Quote O’ The Day

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.  Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
— Thomas Paine

To trust arms in the hands of the people at large has, in Europe, been believed…to be an experiment fraught only with danger. Here by a long trial it has been proved to be perfectly harmless…If the government be equitable; if it be reasonable in its exactions; if proper attention be paid to the education of children in knowledge and religion, few men will be disposed to use arms, unless for their amusement, and for the defence of themselves and their country. — Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 1823

The supposed quietude of a good mans allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside…Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them… — Thomas Paine

Today the taxing power, rather than chattel slavery, is the instrument by which the parasitical element of the population subsists. And that element, which includes politicians, panics at the slightest reduction in the state’s power to plunder. Once you start liberating taxpayers, even a little tiny bit, nobody knows where it may end. —Joseph Sobran

Why does the left hate free speech? Because they don’t know how to talk about the substantive merits when they are challenged. Having submerged themselves in disciplining each other by denouncing any heretics in their midst, they find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered in America, where there is vibrant debate about all sorts of things they don’t know how to begin to talk about. They resort to stomping their feet and shouting “shut up”… when they aren’t prissily imploring everyone to be “civil.”
–Ann Althouse

Revealingly, the central function of the Constitution as law–the supreme law–was to impose limitations not on the behavior of ordinary citizens but on the federal government. The government, and those who ran it, were not placed outside the law, but expressly targeted by it. Indeed, the Bill of Rights is little more than a description of the lines that the most powerful political officials are barred from crossing, even if they have the power to do so and even when the majority of citizens might wish them to do so.
― Glenn Greenwald

I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life. –Murray N. Rothbard

A government that intended to protect the liberty of the people would not disarm them. A government planning the opposite most certainly and logically would disarm them. And so it has been in the twentieth century. Check out the history of Germany, the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and Cambodia.
-Charlie Reese

Every member of the State ought diligently to read and to study the constitution of his country and teach the rising generation to be free. By knowing their rights, they will sooner perceive when they are violated, and be the better prepared to defend and assert them.
– U.S. Chief Justice John Jay

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious.
But it cannot survive treason from within.
An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.
A murderer is less to fear.
– (the real) Marcus Tullius Cicero (42BC)

No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved in its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defence of the state. . . . Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.
– “M.T. Cicero” 1788

If you believe in so-called “Gun Control”, then you believe that the Second Amendment, ratified in 1787, specifically and exclusively refers to the National Guard, which was created 130 years later, in 1917.

If you believe in so-called “Gun Control”, then you believe that the National Guard, federally funded, with bases on federal land, using federally-owned weapons, vehicles, buildings, and uniforms, punishing trespassers under federal law, is a “State” militia.

If you believe in so-called “Gun Control”, then you believe that private citizens shouldn’t have handguns because they are not “military weapons,” but private citizens shouldn’t have assault rifles because they are military weapons.

If you believe in so-called “Gun Control”, then you believe that “Assault Weapons” have no purpose other than to kill large numbers of people. The police need assault weapons. You do not.

“…The right of the people peacefully to assemble for lawful purposes existed long before the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. In fact, it is and always has been one of the attributes of a free government. It `derives its source,’ to use the language of Chief Justice Marshall, in Gibbons v Ogden, 9 Wheat., 211, `from those laws whose authority is acknowledged by civilized man throughout the world.’ It is found wherever civilization exists. It was not, therefore, a right granted to the people by the Constitution… The second and tenth counts are equally defective. The right there specified is that of `bearing arms for a lawful purpose.’ This is not a right granted by the constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” 
– U.S. v. Cruikshank (1875)

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective for the abuse of constitutional power.
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to W.C. Jarvis, 1820.