Sayings
Issue #62 Posted November '09

"These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." -- Thomas Paine

"The choice to carry a gun-- for whatever reason a person chooses-- is his [your] own. He is a Sovereign Citizen and sui juris. The State has no say in the matter. It is strictly an individual choice, and a God-given right. The right to keep and bear arms is an absolute, secured by the Bill of Rights." -- James Wesley Rawles, Triple 0

"Always be armed, because you can't know when the Test will come. The chronically unprepared have no right to complain about perpetual "victim" status." -- John Farnam

"Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in the Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the opposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." -- George Washington, in his Farewell Address of 1796

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time. ... Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever." -- Thomas Jefferson

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." -- Alexander Hamilton

"Barack Obama's vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience. The Constitution of the United States gives NO president, nor the entire federal government, the authority to do such things. But spending trillions of dollars to bail out all sorts of companies buys the power to tell them how to operate. Appointing judges to the federal courts -- including the Supreme Court -- who believe in expanding the powers of the federal government to make arbitrary decisions, choosing who will be winners and losers in the economy and in the society, is perfectly consistent with a vision of the world where self-confident and self-righteous elites rule according to their own notions, instead of merely governing under the restraints of the Constitution." -- Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell

"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition." -- Thomas Jefferson

"We will not disarm. You cannot convince us. You cannot intimidate us. You can try to kill us, if you think you can. But remember, we'll shoot back. Your move." -- The Doctrine of the Three Percent

"If a nation expects to be ignorant -- and free ... it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

"You can ignore reality. What you cannot ignore are the consequences of ignoring reality." -- Ayn Rand

"We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence upon those who would do us harm." -- George Orwell

"It takes 37 muscles to frown and only 7 to smile. However, it takes just FOUR to pull a trigger."

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." -- Shopenhauer

"Mind must be the stronger, heart the bolder, courage must be the greater, as our might lessens." -- from the manuscript of Otho A.xii, The Battle of Maldon (and inscribed over Jeff Cooper's fireplace at the Sconce).

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

"A man slandered is doubly injured-- first by him who utters the calumny, and then by him who believes it." -- Herodotus

"You should punish in the same manner those who commit crimes with those who accuse falsely." -- Thucydides

"You should not honor men more than truth." -- Plato

"Every day you meet a delegation going to some convention to try and change the way of somebody else's life." -- Will Rogers

"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor" -- Aristotle

"Power as an end in itself-- power because it's neat and makes people want to be around you and give you money and beg favors of you-- is the great temptation, the overpowering seducer of good men and good women." -- William Murchison

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." -- George Washington

"He was the kind of a man who you didn't have to look to see if he was with you; you knew damn well he was" -- Louis L'Amour

"The thing they forget is that liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and stop. You do not do that. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them!" -- Sergeant Alvin York

"Never forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anybody has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn't let him do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, and rapists, and even more so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians." -- from the novel Hope by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith

"The man who knows the truth and has the opportunity to tell it, but who nonetheless refuses to, is among the most shameful of all creatures. God forbid that we should ever become so lax as that." -- Theodore Roosevelt

"The first law of the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth... There shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice." -- Cicero

"Government is not a necessary good but an unavoidable evil." -- Lyn Nofziger

"Maturity is achieved when a person postpones immediate pleasures for long-term values." -- Joshua Liebman

"The construction applied... to those parts of the Constitution of the United States which delegate Congress a power... ought not to be construed as themselves to give unlimited powers." -- Thomas Jefferson

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion — when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing — when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors — when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed." -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your objective. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Failure is only postponed success as long as courage 'coaches' ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory." -- Herbert Kaufman

"It has often been said there are no rules in a gun fight. Not true! The first rule of gun fighting is 'have a gun'. If you do not have a gun, do not come to a gun fight. Just having a gun on your person when you need it is 90% of the fight. Everything else - caliber, action type, ammunition, even skill - is way back in second place. Have a gun." -- Mark Moritz

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war." -- Sir Francis Bacon

"Not everything you may care about is in the Constitution. It is a legal document that had compromises in it. What it says it says; what it doesn't say it doesn't say." -- Justice Antonin Scalia

"Our sovereignty is the foundation for our freedom. Sovereignty should rest strictly with the American people. We cannot allow a foreign country or an international organization to make decisions that should be our own exclusive province, based on our own national interests." -- Sen. John Cornyn

"Our republican form of government requires lawmakers who carefully consider the consequences of every law they pass and every treaty they approve." -- Ed Feulner

"Bad ideas don't die. Nor do they fade away. They just translate themselves into different forms, in different places, in different times." -- Matthew Continetti

"Political competition is the lifeblood of American politics. The ability to vote out incumbents has proved to be far more effective than selectively enforced 'ethics' rules." -- John Fund

"A truth that's told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent." -- William Blake

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." -- Voltaire

"I am easily satisfied with the very best." -- Winston Churchill

"There should be a tax on every man that wanted to get a government appointment, or be elected to office. In two years that tax alone would pay our national debt." -- Will Rogers

"The liberty enjoyed by the people of these states of worshiping Almighty God agreeably to their conscience, is not only among the choicest of their blessings, but also of their rights." -- George Washington

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." -- Barry Goldwater

"Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all." -- Voltaire

"All propaganda is lies-- even when it is telling the truth." -- George Orwell

"It is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to the world." -- Theodore Roosevelt

"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." -- Groucho Marx

"Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason." -- Benjamin Franklin

"The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible."-- Thomas Hardy

"If you have a reputation as an early riser, you can sleep till Noon." -- Huey Long

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." -- John Adams

"It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn." -- George Washington

"War 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 which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other." -- John Stuart Mill

"Don't suffer from PTSD, go out and cause it," -- Grossman

"[T]here are particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn." -- James Madison

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." -- G. K. Chesterton

"Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family." -- Herbert Hoover

"All that the law can do is to shape things so that no injustice shall be done by one to the other, and that each man shall be given the first chance to show the stuff that is in him." -- Theodore Roosevelt

"You can't be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy." -- Ronald Reagan

"If men of wisdom and knowledge, of moderation and temperance, of patience, fortitude and perseverance, of sobriety and true republican simplicity of manners, of zeal for the honor of the Supreme Being and the welfare of the commonwealth; if men possessed of these other excellent qualities are chosen to fill the seats of government, we may expect that our affairs will rest on a solid and permanent foundation." -- Samuel Adams

"To render the justice of the war on our part the more conspicuous, the reluctance to commence it was followed by the earliest and strongest manifestations of a disposition to arrest its progress. The sword was scarcely out of the scabbard before the enemy was apprised of the reasonable terms on which it would be resheathed." -- James Madison

"Freedom was given to humanity by God. But, governments, if they can help it, never give freedom. They just hand out slavery with slogans." -- Taylor Caldwell

"To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils." -- Thomas Holcroft

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." -- William Hazlitt

"That's what a Congressman or a Senator is for-- to see that too much money don't accumulate in the national Treasury." -- Will Rogers

"In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will now and then peek out and show itself." -- Benjamin Franklin

2009-6