Quotes: famous gun nuts
Posted by Richard on October 2, 2005
It’s been over a month since the last time I posted a collection of quotes. Here are some of my favorite quotes related to firearms and self-defense from various famous gun nuts:
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.
— Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi, An Autobiography, page 446Laws 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.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1764Those who beat their swords into plowshares usually end up plowing for those who didn’t.
— Ben FranklinFalse is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature … laws not preventive but fearful of crimes.
— BeccariaA fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.
— Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to PsychoanalysisIf someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.
— The Dalai LamaRifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. …A simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.
— George OrwellWhat country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.
— Thomas JeffersonIf 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 AbbeyA free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.
— George WashingtonTo disarm the people is the best and most effective way to enslave them.
— George MasonWar 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
The Dalai Lama and Ghandi quotes, and the second Jefferson quote, are available on T-shirts from FlashBunny.org as part of their "Famous Gun Nuts" line. Believe me, you get some interesting reactions when wearing the Dalai Lama or Ghandi shirt. Liberals tend to display some amusing expressions after they read the quote accompanying the picture.
Assuming you have the Flash player installed, you might want to look at some of the FlashBunny.org movies, too, especially the one entitled (in)Famous Gun Nuts.
Do you have a favorite self-defense or gun quote that I missed? If so, drop it into the comments. I’m going to grab another beer.
UPDATE: Jed Baer of FreedomSight emailed me a bunch of quotes because Blog-City’s comments require Javascript and he doesn’t do Javascript. I really like this one:
An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.
— Col. Jeff Cooper
As for the rest, I suggested he post them at FreedomSight, so look for them there.
reverse_vampyr said
Great post! I’ll have to see if I’ve got a quote or two to add. I’ll be back…
Jan from Denver said
Franklin and Freud are my favorites and they would make good t-shirt slogans. John Stuart Mill, while not t-shirt material, is sobering to me. It could have been written yesterday about Cindy Shehan. The truth in all the comments is timeless.
jed said
Oh, rub it in. 😉
I sometimes do JavaScript, but only on special occasions. It just bugs me when it hits me “out of the blue”, particularly for web functions where it just isn’t necessary.
Anyways, I have an enormous collection of quotations, which I someday need to get around to getting “normalized” and accessible in a readily accessible format. One of the things on my “to do” list, particularly since one part of the collection is a forum thread archive, so I have to parse out the HTML — a job for Perl, meaning I’d have to hone my Perl coding skills a bit, or try to do it in PHP maybe.
jed said
Hmmm, do you moderate your trackbacks?
Well, I’ll just link-whore away. 🙂
Quotes from Famous Gun Nuts
Anonymous said
Jed: Blog-City sends me email about new trackbacks (and comments), and holds some trackbacks until I log in and approve them. I’m not sure what system they use, but they hold back about 99% of the spam and maybe only half the legitimate ones, so I guess I can’t complain. You’re welcome to, though — fat lot of good it’ll do you. 😉
ru said
Even God is for guns, he could have struck down Goliath but instead he made David shoot him.