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Pro-Freedom QuotesIf you have a quote you'd like to see posted here, please send it to christopher(at)diArmani.com. |
These things I believe:
-- Lyn Nofziger |
| REMEMBER! The Constitution was written to protect THE PEOPLE FROM THE GOVERNMENT - NOT to protect the government from the people! |
| "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |
| "I'd rather have a gun and not need it than need a gun and
not have it." - Christian Slater (In the movie "True Romance") |
| Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. - Edmund Burke |
| "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton |
| "The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." - Samuel Adams |
| "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. " - Samuel Adams |
| "Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can." - Samuel Adams |
| "Be more wary of the rights you are willing to give away, just because YOU are not using them -- the next person may be willing to give away YOUR rights." - Dave Tomlinson, NFA |
| "When law and morality contradict each other the citizen has
the cruel alternative of either losing his or her sense of morality
or losing his or her respect for the law" - Frederick Bastiat |
| Trust is a two way street.
If your government does not trust you, how can you trust your government? - Bruce Montague |
"If we expected self-reliance of family groups, if we expected hardiness and resilience and initiative on the part of individuals, and if we rewarded initiative instead of dependence on government, we would not only ameliorate many of the family-related social problems we see at present, but we would also reduce our vulnerability to terrorism. People who are hardy, resilient, and self reliant are a lot harder to terrorize." - Bernard H. Levin, FBI National Academy Associate, November/December 2004, Volume 6, Number 6, Page 25.
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"Anti-domestic violence and women's groups create the impression that guns are always part of the problem and never part of the solution. The current mainstream of feminism -- from which most anti-domestic violence advocates proceed -- is an expression of left liberalism. It rejects private solutions based on individual rights in favor of laws aimed at achieving social goals. A responsible individual holding a gun in self-defense does not fit their vision of society. In the final analysis, such advocates do not trust the judgment of the women they claim to be defending. ... The true meaning of being anti-domestic violence means is to help victims out of their victimhood and into a position of power." -- Wendy McElroy |
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom. - F.A. Hayek |
| For in a Republic, who is "the country?" Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. - Mark Twain |
| There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. - Robert Heinlein |
| No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him. - Thomas Jefferson |
| The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster. - Ludwig von Mises |
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom." - Ayn Rand |
| Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. - Woodrow Wilson |
| "You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common, they don't alter the their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering." - Doctor Who, The Face of Evil. |
| "The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill." - Ayn Rand |
| A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. - Edward Abbey |
| The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. - H.L. Mencken |
| Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| Any excuse will serve a tyrant. - Aesop |
| "The darkest places in hell are reserved
for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis." - Dante |
| "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for the good men to do nothing." - unknown |
| "Better to die on your feet,... than to live on your knees" - Zappata |
| "Live free or die." - the caption on New Hampshire license plate |
| "If you have got to resist, your chances of being hurt are less, the more lethal your weapon." - Dr. Arthur Kellerman New England Journal of Medicine |
| "A gun is 32 times more likely to be used to defend against criminal threat than to kill anybody." - Dr. Preston Covey |
| "When the government fears the people ... we have democracy .... when the people fear the government ... we have tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson |
| "Most of the time most people know the right thing to do ...its the doing of it that gives them trouble" - Harry S. Truman |
| "LIBERTY is something you cannot have, unless you are willing to give it to others." - Unknown |
| "Reckless, homicidal and suicidal people may own guns but gun ownership does not make anyone reckless, homicidal or suicidal." - Dr. Preston Covey |
| "In Germany they first came for the communists - -Pastor Martin Niemoller (Lutheran Pastor) |
| "A land where only the police (and military) have guns is called a Police State!" |
| "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein |
| "Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience,..." - John Locke,2nd Treatise of Government,1690 |
| Henry Bowman asks his professor "Prof, Arkes, I don't disagree with the basic principle, but it's not enough just to say, "Totaltarian regimes are wrong, so don't let the State enslave you". That's like saying, "Don't get sick". The important question is, when do you know it's going to become enslavement? When is the proper time to resist with force?"...... But when you're naked and seventy pounds below your healthy weight, it's too late. You have no chance. On the other hand, no one would support you if you started an armed rebellion because the government posts speed limits on open roads and arrests people for speeding. So when is it not too late, but also not too early? -- Unintended Consequences by John Ross, Page 337 |
| "It is true that I must run great risk; no gallant action was ever accomplished without danger." - letter to the American Commissioners in Paris, 1778. |
| >From 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' by Robert Heinlein;
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." |
| "Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who don't." - unknown |
| "In the Beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot" - Mark Twain |
| "The best way to lose your freedoms is to stop exercising them." |
| "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 ruined... The great object is that every man be armed... everyone who is able may have a gun." - Patrick Henry (in 3 Elliot at 45) |
| "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is two wolves attempting to have the sheep for dinner, and finding a well-informed and well-armed sheep." |
| "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." - Thomas Paine |
| "A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity." - Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanlysis |
| "A ruler is legitimate only in so far as he upholds the law. A ruler that violates the law is illegitimate. He has no right to be obeyed; his commands are mere force and Rulers who act lawlessly, whose laws are unlawful, are mere criminals." - John Locke |
| "Freedom consists in a people's being governed by laws made with their own consent." - Swift: Drapier's Letters (1725). |
| In logic, to deny a necessary consequence is to deny the premise on which it rests
-no matter what the motives of the denier. To deny the right to arms is to deny
the right to live. The rest is just a matter of time, circumstance,
and how much the leftists think they can get away with. - Peter Landry |
| The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H.L. Mencken |
| A note on democracy: As a Supreme Court Justice recently said; "Five people in a life raft cannot, as an act of democracy, vote in favour of eating the sixth." |
| "War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." - John Stuart Mill |
| "I don't trust a government I can't shoot back at" - Claire Wolfe |
| Laws that forbid the carrying of arms, disarm only those who are inclined to obey the law. - From Unintended Consequences by John Ross |
| "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 limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, 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." - Henry St. George Tucker, in Blackstone's 1768 "Commentaries on the Laws of England." |
| Unregistered Firearms in the hands of honest citizens: Liberty's Teeth. Visit pgp.com for more information. |
| Hoplophobia (n.): The irrational fear of weapons, correctly described by Freud as "a sign of emotional and sexual immaturity". Hoplophobia, like homophobia, is a displacement symptom; hoplophobes fear their own "forbidden" feelings and urges to commit violence. This would be harmless, except that they project these feelings onto others. The sequela of this neurosis include irrational and dangerous behaviors such as passing "gun-control" laws and trashing the Constitution. |
| He who goes unarmed in paradise, had better be sure that that is where he is. - unknown |
| "No democracy that so distrusts the majority can long remain a democracy; it becomes a police state in the worst tradition of police states." - Unknown |
| We are free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. - William Faulkner |
| "Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire a dangerous servant and a terrible master." - George Washington |
| "The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military. The hired servants of our rulers. Only the government-and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws." - Edward Abbey "The Right to Arms" [New York, 1979] |
| "...a state that deprives its law-abiding citizens of the means to effectively defend themselves is not civilized but barbarous, becoming an accomplice of murderers, rapists, and thugs and revealing its totalitarian nature by its tacit admission that the disorganized, random havoc created by criminals is far less a threat than are men and women who believe themselves free and independent, and act accordingly." - Jeffrey R. Snyder, "A Nation of Cowards" |
| "One of the ordinary modes by which tyrants accomplish their purpose, without resistance, is by disarming the people and making it an offense to keep arms". - Joseph Story, U.S. Supreme Court Justice. |
| "Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms." - Aristotle, "Politics" |
| I am willing to defend my property and liberty with the same force
and enthusiasm as the ones that try to take it away! - Bruce Montague. |
| All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse
allegiance to, and resist, the government, when its tyranny or its
inefficiency are great and unendurable. - Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience", 1849 |
| "Canadian politicians, unlike Americans or those who've actually lived under oppression, value peace higher than freedom. Peace-seekers need reminding that cattle on a well-run farm have the ideal peaceful existence: abundant food, warm accommodation, no threats - until the day they go to the slaughter house. That's not the sort of peace most of us value." Peace is Lloyd's game, a Nobel Prize is his aim - PETER WORTHINGTON Toronto Sun January 12, 1999 |
| "Experience hath shewn [sic] that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." - Thomes Jefferson |
| When asked "Is it worth risking my life to defend my property?", I ask "Is it worth risking your life to take away my property?" - Bruce Montague. |
| "Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." - Frederich Douglass |
| "A people who chose security over liberty will receive neither nor deserve either." - Benjamin Franklin |
| "...when you ask 'What can one do?'- the answer is 'SPEAK' (provided you know what you are saying)....Speak on any scale open to you, large or small....Do not pass up a chance to express your views on important issues." - Ayn Rand |
| "Today's citizen is obliged to find his freedom only in the narrow ruts pre-approved by his bureaucratic overlords. "Risk-free liberty" is the ideal of the Welfare State: citizens are permitted only liberties which have been declawed, defanged, neutered, certified and wrapped in benevolent restrictions." - James Bovard |
| "One cannot have a right to life without the right to defend it with deadly force." - Bruce Montague |
| "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." - Tacitus |
| Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only after the last Gun is seized. Only then will you find out that Money Cannot Be Eaten. ~Cree Prophecy~ |
| " "Trusting contemporary governments means dividing humanity into two classes: those who can be trusted with power to run other people's lives, and those who cannot even be trusted to run their own lives. Modern Leviathans seek progress by giving some people the power to play God with other people's lives, property, and domestic tranquility." - James Bovard |
| You don't have to go through life snarling, but it's knowing you're
willing to fight that keeps the other dogs out of your dish. - Unknown |
| "There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction." - Ayn Rand |
| People sometimes rationalize their greed by saying that it is all for
the good of their children but this is nothing but an excuse they use
to make their despicable actions appear respectable and praiseworthy. - Democritus (460-370 BC) |
| "Sovereign immunity creates a two-tier society - those above the law and those below it, those whom the law fails to bind and those whom the law fails to protect. In some parts of this nation, laws against abusing pets are better enforced than are laws against government employees abusing citizens. Sovereign immunity presumes that the more evils that government officials are permitted to commit, the more good they will achieve. Sovereign immunity presumes that in order to protect people, government must be permitted to destroy them." - James Bovard- freedom in chains |
| "Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)" - Ayn Rand |
The following appears to be the mindset of the anti-gun group:
- excerpted from a list by Michael Z. Williamson. |
| "The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." - Herbert Spencer |
"FREEDOM" For those who Fought, Bled and Died For It
"FREEDOM" has a flavour the protected will never Know or Savor. - Anonymous |
| "Our country is at an awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but it's too early to shoot the bastards." - Claire Wolfe |
| "Those of us who support the citizens' right to guns believe the vast majority of people make good choices. Anti-gunners have much less faith in others; perhaps even in themselves." - unknown |
| Only crooked politicians fear armed citizens. - unknown |
| Politicians and diapers have one thing in common. They should both be changed regularly and for the same reason. |
| "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the labourer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith |
| "Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions... Liberty and responsibility are inseparable." - F.A. Hayek |
| "As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." - Justice William O. Douglas, US Supreme court (1939-75) |
"We don't have a gun control problem in Canada.
We have a government control problem in Ottawa". - unknown |
"Pity the poor, wretched timid soul who is too faint hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the damned: "I can't fight back, I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard for what I have; they will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about." Such poor miserable creatures are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility." - Author Unknown - If you have that much to fight for, then you should be fighting. |
| "Security is the mother of danger and the grandmother of destruction" - Thomas Fuller |
| Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves... - William Pitt, Speech to the house of Commons, 18 November, 1783 |
Misc. One-Liners- An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject. |
"You may not like guns. You may choose not to own one. That is your right. You might not believe in God. That is your choice. However, if someone breaks into your home at 3AM the first two things you are going to do are: 1) Call someone with a gun. - A wise man. |
| "They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom, For trying to change the system from within." - Leonard Cohen |
| "We fight not for glory, nor for wealth, nor honour but only and alone for freedom which no good man surrenders but with his life." - Robert the Bruce |
| If you can't trust a weapon to an individual, how can you trust it to a group of individuals? - unknown |
| "Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people except by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." - Patrick Henry |
| In an October, 1995 speech to a woman's group, the registry's chief architect, Justice Minister Allan Rock proclaimed that "guns in the hands of criminals are not the problem - guns in our homes are the problem". |
| The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights. - H.L.Mencken |
| "Minds are like parachutes. They only function if they are open." -author unknown |
| The sentiment that modern day ordinary Canadians do not need firearms for protection is pleasant but unrealistic. To discourage responsible deserving Canadians from possessing firearms for lawful self-defence and other legitimate purposes is to risk sacrificing them at the altar of political correctness. - Alberta Provincial Court Judge Demetrick |
| "There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth. It is apparent that men can be social beings no longer than they believe each other. When speech is employed only as the vehicle of falsehood, every man must disunite himself from others, inhabit his own cave and seek prey only for himself" - Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century moralist. |
| "Fear of death will not prevent dying, but it may prevent living" - Anonymous |
| "You do not examine legislation in light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." - Lyndon B. Johnson |
| A self righteous Liberal with a cause, is more dangerous than a Hells Angel with an attitude. - unknown |
| "I have great sympathy for the oppressed but I do not expect them to be morally superior to the oppressors. I merely expect them to be oppressed." - Jerome Barkow, Anthropologist, Dalhousie University, 1989 |
| "War is an ugly thing, but it is not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degrading moral value which believes that no freedom is worth fighting for is much worse. These men are never truly free unless their freedom is secured and maintained for them by better men." - Anonymous US NCO, 101"t Airborne Div, 1991 |
| "Of all the tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be preferable to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies." - C.S. Lewis |
| "Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way." - Henry David Thoreau |
| A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship. |
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
- Professor Alexander Tyler. 1874 |
| No one ever said our freedoms would come cheap. Some we must be prepared to fight for, some we must be prepared to die for. Take freedom for granted once and it could be gone forever. -1776 |
| "Pity the poor opponents of the right to keep and bear arms! They must distrust just everybody except criminals and except the tyrant to whom they concede the armed monopoly of their protection." - Pierre Lemieux [LIBERTY Magazine Nov. '97] |
| "I may disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it!" - Voltaire |
| "When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you." - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince |
| If we don't all hang together, we will surely be hanged seperately! - unknown. |
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. - Calvin Coolidge, Past President of the United States. |
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