Category: Quote O’ The Day

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.

Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th. We will remember every rescuer who died in honor. We will remember every family that lives in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children. — George W. Bush

In a way, the continuing gun control controversy is much like the prohibition problem in Oklahoma in the fifties and sixties. It was the belief of many that prohibitionists and bootleggers were united in their efforts to prevent the legal sale of alcoholic beverages. In gun control, those who can afford private alarm systems and bodyguards are united with criminals in their desire to keep guns out of the hands of honest citizens.
— Bill Dannenmaier

When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state…this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people. –P. J. O’Rourke

If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government that is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. — JAMES MADISON