Wisdom

• I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
  -- Will Rogers

• What it means to take rights seriously is that one will honor them even when there is significant social cost in doing so.
  -- Sanford Levinson

• "Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You pull the trigger with a lock on and I'll pull the trigger [without a safety lock]. We'll see who wins."
  Mob killer Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, interviewed by Howard Blum, Vanity Fair magazine (9/99)

• Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
  -- C. S. Lewis

• "Politicians are the same all over: they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river."
  -- Nikita Khrushchev (1960)

• Sometlmes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
  -- Thomas Jefferson (1801)

• "The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God."
  -- John F. Kennedy

• "...The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world not destitute of arms, for all would be alike, but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside...Horrid mischief would ensue...the weak will become a prey to the strong."
  -- Thomas Paine

• "Do not swallow bait offered by the enemy."
  -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

• "If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."
  -- Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

• Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
  -- Pericles (430 BC)

• The power of the sword, say [some], is in the hands of Congress. My friends and countrymen, it is not so,.... Who are the militia? are they not ourselves. Is it feared, then that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia.
  Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American. What clause in the state or federal constitution hath given away that important right.... [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
  -- Tench Coxe, 1787?

• "To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..."
  -- Richard Henry Lee, 1787

• That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
  -- GEORGE ORWELL

• "The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."
  -- Unknown

• 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

• "What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?"
  -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

• 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

• Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
  -- Thomas Paine

• There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money -- if a gun is held to his head.
  -- P.J. O'Rourke

• The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
  -- Justice Louis Brandeis (1928)

• No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.
  -- Edmund A. Opitz

• A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
  -- George Bernard Shaw

• When you disarm your subjects, 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

• If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.
  -- Jacob Hornberger (1995)

• 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

• I sometimes wonder whether the socialists will issue an edict requiring all firearms to have a pink ribbon tied to the barrel, just to get a belly laugh as the panicked descendants of once-proud American patriots scurry to comply.
  -- Brian Puckett

• I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other men's rights.
  -- Abraham Lincoln

• Allowing riflery training while decrying gun violence doesn't send a mixed message any more than does supporting a wrestling team while opposing schoolyard brawls.
  -- Chicago Tribune

• There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation.
  -- James Madison

• "I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back."
  -- Leo Tolstoy, undoubtedly writing about government

• There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
  -- P.J. O'Rourke (1993)

• You may not like guns, and 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 the first two things you're going to do are:
  1) Call someone with a gun.
  2) Pray they get there in time.

• God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.
  -- Daniel Webster (1834)

• The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another
  -- Milton Friedman

• He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.
  -- Thomas Paine (1795)

• Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
  -- John Bradshaw

• The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.
  -- Tacitus

• A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
  -- G. Gordon Liddy

• A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.
  -- Edward R. Murrow

• "No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law."
  --Robert Heinlein

• "People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, where 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."
  --L. Neil Smith, from "The Probability Broach"

• Perseverance
  Press on. Nothing in the world can take place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

  It is a fact that more people have given up the game on the goal line simply because they didn't know they were there, than at any other point on the field. Just one more try, one more bit of stubborn determination, could have carried them on to success.

  Why didn't they know? First, because they didn't fully understand what they were doing; second, they lacked the confidence (wisdom would have given them that); and lastly, they didn't believe!

  The person who perseveres is destined to succeed. Talent, genius, education and even money are worthless without it. Only personal dedication to a goal by a self-assured person will do it. "When the going gets tough, the tough get going", sums it up.
  -- Calvin Coolidge