Classic Quotes on Theme

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson

"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." - Frederick Douglass, civil rights activist, 1857.

"The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an 'equalizer.' Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed—but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. - Edward Abbey, Abbey's Road, p. 39 (Plume, 1979)

"Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society's weapons policy might be one of the institutional arrangements that contributes to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered—one does not usually lead to the other—but it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed." - Daniel D. Polsby, Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 73, Number 3, Fall 1997

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, 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." - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Ch. III, "White Blackmail"

"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

"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."

"Wear a gun to someone else's house, you're saying, 'I'll defend this home as if it were my own.' When your guests see you carry a weapon, you're telling them, 'I'll defend you as if you were my own family.' And anyone who objects levels the deadliest insult possible: 'I don't trust you unless you're rendered harmless'!

"... Whenever personal arms have fallen out of fashion, society has become something no sane person would consider worth defending. The same thing happens to individual: they start rotting too, becoming helpless, disdaining to lift a finger because it's 'beneath them.' They're no longer fit to live and are simply proving that they know it!" - L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach

"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." -- Benjamin Franklin

"Those who would give up an essential liberty in order to gain a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson

"Necessity is the excuse for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of the tyrant and the creed of the slave." -- William Pitt, 1763

"One way or another, any government which remains in power is a representative government. If your city government is a crooked machine, then it is because you and your neighbours prefer it that way -- prefer it to the effort of running your own affairs. Hitler's government was a popular government; the vast majority of Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise." - "Take Back Your Government - A Practical Handbook for the private citizen who wants democracy to work." By Robert A. Heinlein.