Famous Quotes & Sayings

George Orwell

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.

George Orwell

Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

Franz Grillparzer

Freedom requires guns.

Franz Grillparzer

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

Jeanette Winterson

When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.

Jeb Bush

Our freedom is under attack. Our economy is under water. The leading democrat is under investigation. And America is under the gun to lead the free world to protect our civilized way of life.

Jeff Cooper

Not to our surprise, we discover that gun crime in Britain is up 10.9 percent since the disarmament of the private citizen.

Jeff Cooper

A free man must not be told how to think, either by the government or by social activists. He may certainly be shown the right way, but he must not accept being forced into it.

Jeff Cooper

Bushido is all very well in its way, but it is no match for a 30-06.

Jeff Cooper

It has long been my conviction that a masked man with a gun is a target. I see no reason to change that view.

Jeff Cooper

A fine marksman is with a second rate rifle is far more effective than the reverse.

Jeff Cooper

It is long been a principal of ours that one is no more armed because he has possession of a firearm than he is a musician because he owns a piano. There is no point in having a gun if you are not capable of using it skillfully.

Jeff Cooper

In the larger sense, however, the personal ownership of firearms is only secondarily a matter of defense against the criminal. Note the following from Thomas Jefferson: The strongest reason for the people to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against the tyranny of government. That is why our masters in Washington are so anxious to disarm us. They are not afraid of criminals. They are afraid of a populace which cannot be subdued by tyrants.

Jeff Cooper

According to Herodotus, the ancient Persians felt that what was necessary in the background of a young man entering adulthood was his ability to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth. Perhaps we should now grant our college degrees to young men who measure up to that standard.

Jeff Cooper

Never assume that simply having a gun makes you a marksman. You are no more armed because you are wearing a pistol than you are a musician because you own a guitar.

Jeff Cooper

The media insist that crime is the major concern of the American public today. In this connection they generally push the point that a disarmed society would be a crime-free society. They will not accept the truth that if you take all the guns off the street you still will have a crime problem, whereas if you take the criminals off the street you cannot have a gun problem.

Jeff Cooper

I am sometimes perplexed by people who refer to defensive rifles, or defensive rifle shooting. The defensive arm is the pistol, since you have it at hand to meet situations that you do not anticipate. If you have the luxury of anticipating a lethal encounter, you pick up a long arm, either a rifle or a shotgun, but in that case you go on to the attack. Thus rifle shooting is offensive, and pistol shooting is defensive. Of course, life does not always duplicate theory, and there are exceptions to everything, but nevertheless the rifle is not a defensive weapon in concept.

Jeff Cooper

Remember the first rule of gunfighting ... have a gun.

Jeff Cooper

Not long ago it was easy to tell who the bad guys were. They carried Kalashnikovs. Now it is much more complicated, but one thing is sure - any man who covers his face and packs a gun is a legitimate target for any decent citizen.

Jeff Cooper

I have long had a tendency to tie marksmanship to morality. The essence of good marksmanship is self-control, and self-control is the essence of good citizenship. It is too easy to say that a good shot is automatically a good man, but it would be equally incorrect to ignore the connection.

Jeff Cooper

That is why our masters in Washington are so anxious to disarm us. They are not afraid of criminals. They are afraid of a populace which cannot be subdued by tyrants.

Jeff Cooper

The will to survive is not as important as the will to prevail... the answer to criminal aggression is retaliation.

Jeff Cooper

The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.

George Will

Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout 'Bang!'

Jhonen Vasquez

The world would be a much nicer place if people only used guns on themselves.

Grover Norquist

Democrats are people who raise your taxes and spend your money on weird stuff. They steal your guns, and they spit on your faith.

Harper Lee

Havin' a gun around's an invitation to somebody to shoot you.

Harper Lee

I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.

Gregory Peck

What is wrong with keeping guns out of the hands of the wrong people?

Ian Paisley

The gun is not out of Irish politics.

Hugo Black

I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th century straitjacket, unsuited for this age...The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today.

Hugh Downs

I sympathize with people who want to ban guns, but I can't agree with them. We have to be careful in our zeal to abolish guns that we don't wind up with counter-productive legislation that will leave armed only the people most likely to do harm with them.

Huey Newton

Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.