“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
“He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.” – John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”
“In a country like America where riots occur during brownouts, and people stab each other for cutting ahead in service station lines during gasoline shortages, one has to wonder how our society would react to a total disruption of its artificial life-support system. In researching magazine articles I’ve interviewed urban disaster planning authorities who are more skeptical about saving their citizens from major civil disruption than Mel Tappan ever was.” – Massad Ayoob, in “The Truth About Self Protection“
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do." – Edward Everett Hale (A descendant of Nathan Hale)