"And this is the law of the jungle; As old and true as the sky. And the wolf that shall keep it will prosper; But he wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, The law runneth forward and back. For the strength of the pack is the wolf, And the strength of the wolf is the pack." – Rudyard Kipling, The Law of the Jungle (from The Jungle Book)
"An armed republic submits less easily to the rule of one of its citizens than a republic armed by foreign forces. Rome and Sparta were for many centuries well armed and free. The Swiss are well armed and enjoy great freedom. Among other evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible. It is not reasonable to suppose that one who is armed will obey willingly one who is unarmed; or that any unarmed man will remain safe among armed servants." – Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince" (1532)
“Like I told my last wife, I says, “Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.” – Kurt Russell as Jack Burton, in John Carpenter’s 1986 film Big Trouble in Little China. (Screenplay by Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein. Adapted by W.D. Richter.)
“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
“Thou calledst in trouble, and I delivered thee; I answered thee in the secret place of thunder: I proved thee at the waters of Meribah. Selah. Hear, O my people, and I will testify unto thee: O Israel, if thou wilt hearken unto me; There shall no strange god be in thee; neither shalt thou worship any strange god. I [am] the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt: open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.” – Psalm 81:7-10 (KJV)
"Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises; for never intending to go beyond promises, it costs nothing." – Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
“As things get worse the next time around, there is going to be violence. When the people realize A.) that what the government has done has been wrong, B.) it hasn’t solved the problem, C.) it has made the problems worse, you are going to see people unhappy, you are going to see social unrest, you are going to see violence, and you will probably see some more governments toppled–no question about that. That may sound like a radical statement; it’s just the way the world has always worked.” – Veteran investment guru Jim Rogers, February, 2010
"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state." – Thomas Jefferson
"Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing. The one cannot be preserved if the other be violated." – Calvin Coolidge
“The best strategy is always to be very strong.” – Carl von Clausewitz, “On War”
“The disease of modern character is specialization…The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself.” – Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
"Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness [which] they have prescribed; To turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and [that] they may rob the fatherless! And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation [which] shall come from far? to whom will ye flee for help? and where will ye leave your glory? Without me they shall bow down under the prisoners, and they shall fall under the slain. For all this his …
"The people of every country are the only guardians of their own rights and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of people themselves, that, too, of the people with a certain degree of instruction." – Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to W.S. Smith, 1787
"I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go." – Martha Washington, from The Life of Washington by Anna C. Reed, niece of a signer of the Declaration of Independence; first published in 1842 by the American Sunday-School Union, now called the American Missionary Fellowship (AMF).
"No citizen has any right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training… The instinct of self-preservation demands it likewise: for how helpless is the state of the ill-trained youth in war or danger!" – Socrates