Author: James Wesley Rawles

“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has …

“Tyrants find great joy in creating all kinds of logical fallacies, mental gymnastics and morally relative sales pitches in order to convince a group of people that their wrong assumptions are right. The truth becomes foggy and evidence becomes unnecessary. In this state of mind, when individuals melt together into a mob, assumptions become cult dictates and “winning” becomes paramount. False assumptions and biases can be used to turn normal upstanding people into monsters, all because they refused to accept that their ideological position was flawed; all because they were afraid to feel embarrassed or admit they had been conned.” …

“Fundamental Rights are those rights that we can derive from a universal non-conflicting criteria that allows all men to exercise their maximum free will without infringing on others rights, equally claimed, nor forcing others to serve their needs. These non conflicting rights are inviolable, and superior to all forms of human government, and therefore not subject to political confirmation. This is a radically new concept to those schooled to believe that the highest form of justice comes by democratic means. It becomes clear, under the concept of “inviolable rights” that fundamental rights should never be subject to ratification, even in …

“Make your attacker advance through a wall of bullets. I may get killed with my own gun, but he’s gonna have to beat me to death with it, cause it’s gonna be empty.” – Thunder Ranch firearms training school founder Clint Smith

“For more than six hundred years—that is, since the Magna Carta in 1215—there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge, what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust, oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the …

“Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” – John Knox

“I don’t know why, but this seemed like one of the nicest things I had learned in the woods–that earthworms, lowly, confined to the darkness of the earth, could make just a little stir in the world.”  – Jean Craighead George, in her perennially best-selling novel My Side of the Mountain