"A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well digested plan is requisite: And their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others, for essential, particularly for military supplies."
"To be prepared for war, is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace."
"Arms in the hands of the citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defense of the country, the overthrow of tyranny or private self-defense."
"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe."
"Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would. Nor is there anything in the common law of England ... inconsistent with that right."
"I hope, therefore, a bill of rights will be formed to guard the people against the Federal government as they are already guarded against their State governments, in most instances."
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every Free State."
"The constitutions of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property and freedom of the press."
"One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them."
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
"For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security."
"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last re-sort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
"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 defend them in the best manner they can."
"...It is always dangerous to the liberties of the people to have an army stationed among them, over which they have no control...The Militia is composed of free Citizens. There is therefore no danger of their making use of their power to the destruction of their own Rights, or suffering others to invade them."
"The said Constitution [shall] be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms."
"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation... Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well-armed, and well-regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
"A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country."
"Tyranny cannot be safe] without a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace."
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is no recourse left but in the exer-tion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government."
"Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or un-ambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others. ...The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."
"... of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny."
"The right of self-defense never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals.
"That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natu-ral and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dan-gerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and gov-erned by, the civil power."
"I ask sir, what is the militia? It is the whole body of the people except for a few public officials. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them..."
"That the people have a Right to mass and to bear arms; that a well-regulated militia composed of the Body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper natural and safe defense of a free State..."
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
"... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare be-tween the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the reve-nues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ..."
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! - I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
"They tell us that we are weak—unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Three million people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us."
"The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun."
"Are we at least brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in our possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?"
“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people…We have to be repetitive about this. We need to do this every day of the week, and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.” Eric Holder
"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans. And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities." President William Jefferson Clinton.
"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees." William Jefferson Clinton
"The United States can't be so fixed on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..." William Jefferson Clinton
"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans ..."President William Jefferson Clinton
"You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say."
President William Jefferson Clinton
"The Constitution is a radical document... it is the job of the government to rein in people's rights."
President William Jefferson Clinton
"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society." Hillary Clinton
"Society's needs come before the individual's needs." Adolf Hitler
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so." Adolf Hitler
"We have to license and register all handguns." Senator Hillary Clinton
"A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie."
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) First leader of the U.S.S.R.
"Banning guns is an idea whose time has come." U.S. Senator Joe Biden
"Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power." Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author commenting on the lack of protest with which Japanese tolerated governmental corruption, Los Angeles Times, 10/15/92..
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
"I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise vio-lence." Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State." Heinrich Himmler
"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."
Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice.
"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity." Sigmund Freud, General In-troduction to Psychoanalysis (1952).
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead (1901-1978), American Anthropologist
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible." Sen. Hubert Humphrey
"...By calling attention to a well-regulated militia for the security of the Nation, and the right of each citi-zen to keep and bear arms, our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fear of governmental tyranny, which gave rise to the Second Amendment, will ever be an important danger to our Nation, the Amendment remains an im-portant declaration of our basic military-civilian relationship, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the Second Amendment will always be important." President John F. Kennedy
"If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of crime rates reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying -- that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, and the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 -- establishes the repeated, complete, and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime." Senator Orrin Hatch
"To prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm . . . is an unwarranted restriction upon the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot un-armed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." Arkansas Supreme Court Wilson v. State, 33 Ark. 557, 560, 1878
"The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned. Because the ownership of firearms is constitutionally protected, its regulation is a matter of statewide concern. The constitution does not provide that the right to bear arms shall not be questioned in any part of the commonwealth except Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where it may be abridged at will, but that it shall not be questioned in any part of the commonwealth." Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, 545 Pa. 279; 681 A.2d 152; 1996 Pa. Lexis 1447, May 1, 1996, Argued July 18, 1996, Decided.
"We're going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy! We're going to beat guns into submission!" U.S. Rep. Charles Schumer
"Once Brady is signed into law, we will have to go back and get this sunset [phaseout of the delay] un-done." U.S. Rep Charles Schumer
"You know, we're having trouble in the House. It's neck and neck on an assault weapons ban, which is a ban of the most obnoxious kinds of weapons that nobody uses." U.S. Rep Charles Schumer