"The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."
--Thomas Jefferson
"The ultimate civil right is the right to defend one's own life, that without that right all other rights are meaningless."
-- Prof. Robert Cottroll
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
- Plato
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much ...to forget it.
-- James Madison
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
- Frederick Douglass
"No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Thomas Jefferson
"Executing a murderer is the only way to adequately express our horror at the taking of an innocent life. Nothing else suffices. To equate the lives of killers with those of victims is the worst kind of moral equivalency. If capital punishment is state murder, then imprisonment is state kidnapping and restitution is state theft."
Don Feder
"Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may 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 consciences."
-- C.S. Lewis
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
- Thomas Jefferson, June 1776
"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."
- Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in "On Crimes and Punishment" (1764).
"And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the right of resistance? Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
--Thomas Jefferson