imported post
Having been involved in a number of contentious threads here, the question occurred to me whether we should be listening to opposing views or not? I say ‘we’ because I am[/i] a member here and because I have expressed opposing views, some of which I have had to relinquish or modify as a result of these discussions.
Following are some famous and not so famous quotations regarding the keeping and bearing of arms. Some are interesting for the people who said them, others for what they said, and some for the context or historical period in which they were said. They express a wide range of points of view, some of which not everyone here will agree with, but aught to at least consider, lest we become blinded by our own convictions.
Please feel free to add your own favorites to the list.
Having been involved in a number of contentious threads here, the question occurred to me whether we should be listening to opposing views or not? I say ‘we’ because I am[/i] a member here and because I have expressed opposing views, some of which I have had to relinquish or modify as a result of these discussions.
Following are some famous and not so famous quotations regarding the keeping and bearing of arms. Some are interesting for the people who said them, others for what they said, and some for the context or historical period in which they were said. They express a wide range of points of view, some of which not everyone here will agree with, but aught to at least consider, lest we become blinded by our own convictions.
Please feel free to add your own favorites to the list.
- An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. - Robert A. Heinlein
- We are twice armed if we fight with faith. – Plato
- People should be defended not by arms, but by ethical behavior. - Vinoba Bhave
- First and foremost arms are tools in the service of rivals, pointing at the possibility of a future conflict. - Alva Myrdal
- Disarmament or limitation of arms, which depends on the progress made on our security, also contributes to the maintenance of peace. - Ludwig Quidde
- Every success in limiting armaments is a sign that the will to achieve mutual understanding exists, and every such success thus supports the fight for law and order. - Ludwig Quidde
- A system is in equilibrium when the forces constituting it are arranged in such a way as to compensate each other, like the two weights pulling at the arms of a pair of scales. - Rudolf Arnheim
- 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. – Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi
- Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? - Patrick Henry
- Be careful: they have arms, and no alternatives. - Ryszard Kapuscinski
- Farewell to Arms. – Ernest Hemingway
- Free men have arms; slaves do not. - William Blackstone
- Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave. - Emile M. Cioran
- I don't need arms, and neither does anyone else... At the very least, a ban would prevent fights from turning deadly. - Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
- If you wish to be brothers, let the arms fall from your hands. One cannot love while holding offensive arms. - Gerald Brenan
- Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms. - Wendell Phillips
- It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down. - Simone Weil
- It seems to me we have been in a rhetorical arms race in this country, with each side unwilling to lay down its weapons for fear - usually justified - the other side would beat them to a pulp. - Pat Sajak
- Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don't let yourself believe it will happen to you. - Muhammad Ali
- The thing about a gun is that number one it just scares people! – Gina Davis
- One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them. - Thomas Jefferson
- One man excels in eloquence, another in arms. - Virgil
- Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear. - Douglas MacArthur
- Our goal is not to crush the enemy at any price, but to make it realize that it is illegal to take up arms to overthrow a democratically elected government. - Jose Eduardo Dos Santos
- Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms. - Ron Paul (father of Rand Paul)
- Terrorists also want to use simple and reliable arms. - Mikhail Kalashnikov
- The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms. You cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow. - Niccolo Machiavelli
- The right wing always mobilizes around constitutional amendments: the right to bear arms, school prayer. - Al Sharpton
- The Second Amendment says we have the right to bear arms, not to bear artillery. - Robin Williams
- The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone. - Pope John XXIII
- The war is coming to the streets of America and if you are not keeping and bearing and practicing with your arms then you will be helpless and you will be the victim of evil. - Ted Nugent
- The word ‘knight’, which originally meant boy or servant, was particularly applied to a young man after he was admitted to the privilege of bearing arms. - Thomas Bulfinch
- There are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms, and no possible disadvantage. - Joel Barlow
- There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. - Ida B. Wells
- These people are very unskilled in arms... with 50 men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished. - Christopher Columbus
- Those entrusted with arms... should be persons of some substance and stake in the country. - William Windham
- 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
- Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. - Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men. - Pope John Paul II
- War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms. – Niccolo Machiavelli
- We are the nation most powerful, most armed, and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world. - Dorothy Day
- We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns. - Joseph Goebbels
- When I slept it was literally in the midst of an arsenal. If I heard dogs bark more fiercely than usual, or the feet of horses in a greater volume of sound than usual, I stood to arms. - Frank James
- When the Constitution gave us the right to bear arms it also made us responsible for using them properly. It is not fair of us as citizens to lean more heavily on one side of that equation than on the other. - Jesse Ventura
- Where do these arms come from, these Saturday night specials that constitute the instrument of threats in bank robberies, or the hand grenades used by terrorists? How can their sales and their import be permitted? - Alva Myrdal
- With this realization, came a growing need for men and women willing to take up arms in an effort to protect our American way of life and the freedoms so many of our ancestors died to entrench. - Jim Walsh