Some great quotes I found. As you read please consider the Persons who made each statement.
Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. -- James Madison
Arms in the hands of citizens (may) be used at individual discretion...in private self defense... -- John Adams
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. ... The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be possible. -- Hubert H. Humphrey, Senator, Vice President, 22 October 1959
The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed. -- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-8.
The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. -- Samuel Adams
It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle. We believe in obeying the law. -- Malcom X, March 12, 1964
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
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 unarmed 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, 1878
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. -- James Madison, Federalist Papers, #46 at 243-244.
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
A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie. -- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
A 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 Washington
Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our 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? -- Patrick Henry
Congress shall never disarm any citizen unless such as are or have been in actual rebellion. -- James Madison
A free people ought...to be armed. -- George Washington, speech of Jan. 7, 1790 in the Boston Independent Chronicle, Jan. 14, 1790.
The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun. -- Patrick Henry
I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Tyranny derives from the oligarchy's "mistrust of the people; hence they deprive them of arms, ill-treat the lower class, and keep them from residing in the capital. These are common to oligarchy and tyranny. --Aristotle
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
One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them. --- Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1796. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson
