Sallust

 "Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master."

-Sallust (86-34 B.C.) - current Socialist philosophy.

George Santayana

 "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

-George Santayana

Seneca

 "All cruelty springs from weakness."

-Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD)

 "As it is with a play, so it is with life -- what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will -- only make sure that you round it off with a good ending."

-Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 77

Henry David Thoreau

 There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the "best men," as the Algonquins called them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Mark Twain

 We, free citizens of the Great Republic, feel an honest pride in her greatness, her strength, her just and gentle government, her wide liberties, her honored name, her stainless history, her unbesmirched flag, her hands clean from oppression of the weak and from malicious conquest, her hospitable door that stands open to the hunted and the persecuted of all nations; we are proud of the judicious respect in which she is held by monarchies which hem her in on every side, and proudest of all of that loft patriotism which we inherited from our fathers, which we have kept pure, and which won our liberties in the beginning and has preserved them unto this day. While patriotism endures the Republic is safe, her greatness is secure, and against them the powers of the earth can not prevail."

-Mark Twain

 "Courage is resistance of fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear."

-Mark Twain

 "In the beginning of a change, the Patriot is a scarce man, and brave and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a Patriot."

-Mark Twain

George Washington

 "When firearms go, all goes. We need them every hour."

-George Washington

 "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

-George Washington, from his fairwell address.

 "Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and the keystone under independence... From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurances and tendencies prove that to ensure peace, security, and happiness, the rifle, and pistol are equally indispensable... The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good."

-George Washington

 "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."

- George Washington

 "The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend on God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die."

- George Washington; 1776

Daniel Webster

 "God grants liberty only to those who love it and always stand ready to guard and defend it."

-Daniel Webster

 God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."

-Daniel Webster

 Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.

-Daniel Webster

 "No government is respectable which is not just. Without unspotted purity of public faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political society."

- Daniel Webster

 "Our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be entrusted on any other foundation than religious principle, not any government secure which is not supported by moral habits.... Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens."

- Daniel Webster

 "No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country."

- Daniel Webster

 "Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world."

- Daniel Webster, 1851

 "Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint."

- Daniel Webster; 1847

Noah Webster

 "Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops..."

-Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (P. Ford, 1888)

 "The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. All the miseries and evil men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.

- Noah Webster

Woodrow Wilson

 ......"No nation has the right to interfere with the internal policies of any other nation."

-Woodrow Wilson

 "I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty."

-Woodrow Wilson

 "The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation."

-Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States (1856-1924).

 "A great industrial Nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world -- no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men." –

-Woodrow Wilson

Miscellaneous and Sundry

 Censorship is the keystone of all tyranny.

 Never use yourself as the standard by which you judge other people. If you do, they'll never measure up. (JP)

 Our predecessors' writings must be viewed in the same light in which they were conceived, not in the light of today. To do otherwise is to give meaning to the words that they were never intended to have. (JP)

 The greatest allies of oppressive government are ignorance and sloth.

 The real effect knowledge has on human life is to release the individual from tyranny; the tyranny of ignorance that includes among its subsets the tyranny of the powerful over the weak. It transfers control from authority to the individual.

 "Being an educated person means that, given the necessity, you could re-found your own civilization."

-Mark van Doren

 "Those who wish to retain their respect for laws or sausages should never watch either being made."

-Bismark

 "The optimist says we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist says we live in the best of all possible worlds."

-Annon. Edinburgh

  "He that suffers his life to be taken from him by one that hath no authority for that purpose, when he might preserve it by defence, incurs the Guilt of self murder since God hath enjoined him to seek the continuance of his life, and Nature itself teaches every creature to defend itself."

-From a sermon, Philadelphia, 1747

 Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect it?

If you said the police, think again. It is not the duty of the police to protect individuals, the Appellate Court of D.C. has so ruled. (Warren vs. District of Columbia, D.C. App., 444 A.2d1, 1981)

Besides, how can you morally ask another human being to risk his life to protect your life when you will assume no responsibility yourself?

 All creatures great and small, are born with one inalienable right; the right to protect oneself from harm by any other living thing, the right of self defense. In order to do this effectively one must be able to respond to any attack with equal or greater force than that used against oneself. Failure to defend oneself amounts to suicide. (JP)

 Dictators believe that public order is more important than rule of law.

 "He who goes unarmed in Paradise had better be sure that is where he is."

-James Thurber

 Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid.

 "If a thief is found breaking in, and he is struck so that he dies, there shall be no guilt for his bloodshed." (Exodus 22:2-3)

 Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.

 "A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the whole people themselves."

 History has proven it impossible to disarm criminals, and this includes political criminals. As long as this remains a fact, it will be necessary for honest, decent people to be armed against them.

 In the United State versus Cruikshank," the first case (1876) in which the Supreme Court had the opportunity to interpret the Second Amendment, the court plainly recognized that the right of the people to keep and bear arms was a fundamental right that existed prior to the Constitution, when it stated such a right "is not a right granted by the constitution, neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." As we all know, make that read should know, the Constitution grants no rights. It confirms rights that existed before the Constitution was written - and which still do.

 Society has produced a generation that uses violence as its primary form of entertainment.

 "Gun controls, like animal rights, feminism and popular environmentalism, represent the triumph of emotionalism over wisdom, of sentimentalism over reason, of fantasy over common sense. It is an attempt to reinvent the wheel by people who have failed to grasp the idea of circumference. It is a chaos of perversity, short-circuited thought and unexamined assumptions."

President Clinton and his administration seem to think this is wrong and are doing everything in their power to align us with the rest of the world. God save us.

 The entire world has found socialism wanting and is throwing it off at an astounding rate, all except the American electorate. I fear they are leading us down that path and there is no turning back until they too sicken of it and utterly reject it, but it will be a long, cold night. This item and the last, are not incompatible.

 Every time our young men are called to arms, there is a contingent of bleeding heart journalists, politicians and their camp followers that claim we are sending our young men out to die for their country. They know as well as we do that these young men are not being sent out to die for their country, but to kill for their country. George Patton once told his men, "I do not want you to go out there and die for your country. I want you to go out there and make the other bastard die for his country." We must keep our vision clear and focused.

 It is unclear to me, why criminal activity should have any effect on the civil rights of the law abiding.

 The long habit of living, indisposeth us to death.

 The U.S. Supreme Court in a 1943 decision noted that, "If there is any fixed star in the constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion."

 Cheer up! Those people you read about are the exceptions. Decent people are not newsworthy.

 Resolved: That the timid are not philosophically qualified to comment on the activities of the courageous.

 At age 20, we worry about what others think of us. At age 40, we don't care what they think of us. At age 60, we discover that they haven't been thinking of us at all.

 Don't tell people your troubles. Half don't care, and the other half think you had it coming.

 Experience is a great teacher, but she sends terrific bills.

 "A gun in the hands of a free man frightens and angers the autocrat, not because he fears the power of the gun, but, rather, the spirit of the man who holds it."

-Anon.

 The first rule of gun-fighting is to have a gun.

 "Beware of zealots, for they are humorless. "

-Anon.

 Self-defense is the most basic of all natural rights. No other rights can endure if this right is lost.

 "Where law ends, tyranny begins."

 "In psychological terms, a fanatic is a person who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt."

-Aldous Huxley

 hu'man na'ture, 1. The psychological and social qualities that characterize mankind, esp. In contrast with other living things.

Human nature does not change, cannot change, it is what makes us human. If it were to change, we would no longer be human, and as long as human nature is what it is, we will always have the need to defend ourselves from one another. (JP)

 "Under anarcho-tyranny, the guilty and the dangerous are ignored and the harmless and the innocent bear the brunt of the law, precisely because it's usually safer and easier to punish the innocent than it is to catch, prosecute and punish the real enemies of society."

-Samuel Francis, Wasington Times columnist

 "Should the rights and liberties that the law permits to the law-abiding, be dictated, or determined, by the choices and behavior of the lawless? To ban guns, because criminals use them, is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow. By criminalizing an act that is not wrong in itself - the purchase and sale of a firearm - the ban violates the presumption of innocence, the principle that insures that government honors the liberty of its citizens until their deeds convict them. By completely banning the sale of so-called assault weapons to prevent crime before it occurs, the law effectively and incontestably presumes that all who want such a weapon are no better than the murderers and madmen, forever ineligible to acquire these firearms."

-Jeff Snyder, The Washington Times, August 25, 1994

 When only the police are armed, what you have is a police state.

 "Speaking for myself, there is only one government on earth I don't feel safe from - and it isn't Russia's."

-Joseph Sobran

 "Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles."

-Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery" - paraphrasing Sallust

 "The first thing a conservative notices about liberals is how afraid they are. Any converstion with them quickly - no, immediately - leads to something they fear, and they fear almost everything. They fear food, tobacco, the sun, clothing, cars, open discussion, life, death, etc. Because of many of these deep fears it is not surprising that they are passionately interested in making life 'safe.' Life must be renewed. If something incidental, such as this freedom or that freedom, must be given up in order for life to be 'safer,' then so be it. (Perhaps this makes perfect sense because when someone is consumed by fear he is, in effect, imprisoned. Accordingly, the meaning of freedom changes.)"

-Ed Detrixhe, Clyde, Kansas

 "Control your own destiny, or someone else will."

-Jack Welch, CEO, General Electric

 When starting an "anti" anything group, or campaign, the first point you must establish is that denial is a sure sign of guilt. Once this is established, it makes the accused guilty no matter what.(JP)

 "The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security."

-Louis Freeh, Director of the FBI, 1993

How far we have come since 1776. Doesn't it make you proud to be an American?

 All of the anti-gun laws in the world will not keep a criminal from obtaining and using a gun to carry out a crime. Therefore, anti-gun laws are basically victim disarmament laws. You can also view them as criminal protection laws, giving the criminal a safer working environment, because the guns are taken from people who might be able to use them in self defense. (JP)

 "The whole Bill of Rights is a declaration of the right of the people at large, or considered as individuals...It establishes some rights as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of."

-Albert Galatin, New York Historical Society, Oct.7, 1789

 The Founding Fathers placed the Second Amendment in the Constitution for a reason, and it had nothing to do with putting venison on the dinner table, but rather to make sure the people had the means to resist the rise of a tyrannical government. In the Revolutionary War, which had just passed, the colonists had used their own private firearms to resist the tyrannical government of Great Britain. They, therefore, desired to make sure that if a tyrannical government rose to power here again, the people would be able to resist. The statements and writings of such men as Patric Henry, George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Alexander Hamilton and Richard Henry Lee make this abundantly clear.(JP)

 "Who is so deaf or so blind as he, that willfully will neither hear nor see?"

 "The right of the citizens to keep, and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist, and triumph over them."

-Joseph Story, Chief Justice, Supreme Court

 If Congress eventually passes gun registration laws, criminals will be exempt from them thanks to a 1968 Supreme Court ruling, Haynes v. the United States, in which the court ruled that criminals have a Fifth Amendment right not to register firearms," because it would amount to self-incrimination.

 Josh Sugarman of the Educational Fund to End Handgun Violence explained a deception when he noted that a military-styled semi-automatic's "menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion (ignorance) over fully automatic versus semi-automatic" can only help them win their bans. They know that if the general public was knowledgable about firearms, their bans would stand little chance of passage.

 The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, much to the chagrin of many, establishes beyond any question that powers not granted to the U.S. Government by the U.S. Constitution are specifically unlawful and need not be obeyed. Note that this is from the Sixteenth American Jurisprudence, Second Edition, Section 177: "The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having formed in nature of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void and ineffective for any purpose, since unconstitutionality dates from the date of its enactment and not merely from the date of decision so branding it. An unconstitutional law in legal contemplation is as inoperative as if it had never been passed. Such a statute leaves the question that it purports to settle just as it would be had the statute not been enacted. Since an unconstitutional law is void, the general principles follow that it imposes no duties, confers no rights creates no office, bestows no power or authority on anyone, affords no protection and justifies no acts performed under it. No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it." (But just try and explain this after you've been arrested.)

 The State of New York v. United States, 1992, "The federal government may not compel the states to enact or administer a federal regulatory program."

 "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

-Senator Barry Goldwater

 "The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognised by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these states... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America."

-Gazette of the United States, October 14, 1789

 When referring to "the body of the people," or the "whole people" the drafters of the Constitution were addressing all those eligible for military service. The militia consists of "all able bodied males between the ages of 17 and 45." It did then and it still does today. (JP)

 U.S. v. Miller et al (1939) The Supreme Court, acknowledging that the militia consisted of all able bodied males, added that when called to duty, "these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time."

 Title 10-Armed Forces, U.S. Code, page 95, Chapter 13, "The Militia," Sec. 311: "Sec. 311, (a) The Militia of the United States consists of all able bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 13 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or have made a declaration of intention to become a citizen of the United States." "Sec. 311 (b) the class of militia are: (1) The organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia." (Which is everyone else including you and me.)

U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990) Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote that the term "the People" as used explicitly in the First, Second, Fourth and Tenth Amendment s means the entire general populace that makes up our "national community," thus reaffirming, that in the Second Amendment, the people's right to arms as an individual right rather than a collective, militia right.

 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856) Justice Roger Taney wrote that one of the rights of citizens, "which the courts would be bound to maintain and enforce, " was the right "to keep and carry arms wherever they went."

 Presser v. Illinois (1886) The Supreme Court speaking of militia duty, said "the states cannot prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource... and disable the people from performing their duty to the general government."

 Patsone v. Pennsylvania (1914) Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that although a state, having prohibited a resident alien from hunting the state's wild game, could therefore prohibit his possession of hunting firearms, nevertheless "The prohibition does not extend to weapons such as pistols that may be supposed to be needed occasionally for self-defense."

 Miranda v. State of Arizona, U.S. Supreme Court, 1966, "Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule-making or legislation which would abrogate them."

 From information supplied by Handgun Control, Inc., Discover Magazine reported the following. "For instance, in the District of Columbia private citizens were prohibited from buying or possessing handguns in 1976; soon afterward the rate of gun related homicides and suicides dropped by 15%." The facts are that in D.C. in 1976 the rate was 26.9 per 100,000, and it was up to 36.2 in 1987, and 75 per 100,000 by 1992, leading the nation for large American cities for the fourth straight year. Between 1976 and 1987 the rate increased 36%. Between 1987 and 1992 the rate increased another 107% while the national average for all big cities across the nation for that entire time period was 6%.

 We hear constantly from those who would ban guns that the only purpose of a gun, handguns in particular, is to kill. The implication is that killing is never justified, that in all cases it is wrong to kill. The excuse these people use for banning guns, is the crime problem, which they blame on the proliferation of, and easy access to, guns. In reality this is not a gun problem, but a people problem, in that society has spawned a generation that is ignorant, has no conscience and uses violence as its primary form of entertainment. Let's pretend for a minute that those of you who find no excuse ever for killing, are yourselves the victim of a crime of violence. It could happen you know, especially if crime is as rampant as you suggest. Your home is invaded by two armed men intent on the rape of your wife and daughter and without a second thought will kill all of you on their way out the door. The question is, given the opportunity, would you kill these men in defense of your family and yourself? If your answer is no, then I have some advice for your wife: get yourself another husband, quickly.

 Any living thing that forfeits its right to self-defense will soon become extinct as a specie, and deservedly so.

 From the so called "Gulf War": Note that from August 7, when American troops were deployed in the Gulf, to February 27, when the cease-fire was declared, 298 American troops were killed, either in action or in accidents. During that same time period in Washington D.C. there were 404 homicides perpetrated against disarmed citizens.

 Aristotle, whom our Founding Fathers studied as the greatest of all political philosophers, taught them that free government exalts an armed people, but oligarchies and tyrants "mistrust the people and therefore deprive them of their arms."

 The Founding Father's martyred hero Algernon Sydney wrote: "Swords were given to men by God that none might be Slaves, but such as know not how to use them."

 Sydney's disciples, Trenchard and Moyle, whom our Founding Fathers also revered, declared that having the people armed is "the surest way to preserve" liberty - and to avoid the necessity of a revolution: for government dare not encroach upon the liberties of an armed people: their "Swords will grow rusty in their hands; for that nation is surest to live in Peace, that is most capable of making War; and a Man that hath a Sword by his side, shall have the least occasion to make use of it." Technology has changed,but the reasoning is as sound today as it was then.

 "As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms." - Trench Coxe in "Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution." Under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789.

 God has given life. Refusal to defend it denies and disparages God's gift and is tantamount to suicide. A victim is morally bound to kill rather than allow another to take his or her life.

 "The right of the citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safe-guard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically had proved to be always possible."

-Senator Hubert Humphry

 "History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure."

-Justice Thurgood Marshall, 1989

 There are no dangerous guns, only dangerous people.

 "The two most important rules in a gunfight are: always cheat and always win."

-Clint Smith

 "Don't forget, incoming fire always has the right of way."

-Clint Smith

 "If you carry a gun, people will call you paranoid. That's ridiculous. If I have a gun, what the hell do I have to be paranoid about?"

 "You have the rest of your life to solve your problems. How long you live depends on how well you do it."

 "Make your attacker advance through a wall of bullets. You may get killed with your own gun, but he's gonna have to beat you to death with it, 'cause it's going to be empty."

 "What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty."

-Elbridge Gerry of Mass. I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17, 1789

 When you have no RIGHTS, all that is left is wrongs.

-Akamai Kane

 RIGHTS come from ...GOD "We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." -- Declaration of Independence

 RIGHTS, as opposed to wrongs... RIGHT is RIGHT and whatever is left over is wrong. RIGHTS come from GOD. Privileges come from man.

 "Unalienable" means it cannot be taken away from you. This applies especially to your rights. NO man can take away your RIGHTS. You have them whether you know and use them, or not! (JP)

 "...at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects...with none to govern but themselves; the citizens of America are equal as fellow citizens, and as joint tenants in the sovereignty." CHISHOLM v. GEORGIA (US) 2 Dall 419, 454, 1 L Ed 440, 455 @DALL 1793 pp471-472

 Our rights cannot be taken, and yet a Congressional report clearly states..."Since 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency... A majority of the people of the United States have lived all their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years [now 63 years], freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by he Constitution have in varying degrees been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency." Senate Report 93-459

 "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."

-C.S. Lewis

 "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution," and...

 As President Jefferson said, we need to "Enlighten the People" and such enlightenment must begin with ourselves. As show above, Rights come from God. No governmental legislation can make Rights any more or less than Rights, but it is nice that we have things like the Bill of Rights to draw from. Interestingly, the Bill of Rights is not a list of Citizen's Rights at all, but a list of LIMITATIONS on the government. Read for yourself... The 1st Amendment starts with the words "Congress shall make no law..." and that is a limitation on Congress, not on We the People!

"Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other people's freedom and security."

-William F. Buckley

 "Men that are above all Fear, soon grow above all Shame." – John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon "Cato's Letters: Or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects" [London, 1755]

 Too often foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich nation send their money to the rich people of a poor nation.

 "... The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both. ...Men worry less about doing an injury to one who makes himself loved than to one who makes himself feared. The bond of love is one which men, wretched creatures that they are, break when it is to their advantage to do so; but fear is strengthened by a dread of punishment which is always effective." - -Machiavelli - The Prince; Chapter 17

 "The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure."

-Albert Einstein

 "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

-Oliver Cromwell, in dissolving Parliament, 1653

 "A cardinal rule of bureaucracy is that it is better to extend an error than to admit a mistake."

-Colin Greenwood

 " You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."

-Lyndon Baines Johnson, former Senator and President.

 "The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."

-Will Rogers

 "They have rights who dare maintain them."

-James Russell Lowell

 "The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one."

-William Shenstone

 "In war, there is no substitute for victory."

-General Douglas MacArthur

 "No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation." -- General Douglas MacArthur, title of speech to the people of Japan, May 3, 1948, upon the first anniversary of the Japanese constitution. -- From the book `MacArthur, A Soldier Speaks,' p. 194(1965). Francis T. Miller, author of `General Douglas MacArthur - Fighter for Freedom,' p. 1 (1942), wrote, "[MacArthur] has said many times to friends: `The man who will not defend his freedom does not deserve to be free.'"

 "You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."

-Charles A. Beard

 "With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but with tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."

-William Lloyd Garrison

 "The great German poet, Goethe, who also lived through a crisis of freedom, said to his generation: `What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves or it will not be yours." We inherited freedom. We seem unaware that freedom has to be remade and re-earned in each generation of man." -- Adlai E. Stevenson, `Politics and Morality,' Saturday Review, February 7, 1959, p. 12. He quoted Goethe's Faust, act I, scene i, "Was du ererbt von deinen Vatern hast, / Erwirbes, um es zu besitzen." In Randall Jarrell's translation, "That which you inherit from your fathers / You must earn in order to possess. "

-Goethe's Faust, p. 35 (1976).

 "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent....the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

-Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

 "Poor people have access to the courts in the same sense that the Christians had access to the lions."

-Judge Earl Johnson Jr.

 "It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

-Justice Robert H. Jackson

 "It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

-Justice Robert H. Jackson

 "The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves."

-John Locke

 "Nothing in the World can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan `press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." -- Attributed to Calvin Coolidge.

 Unverified, though this appeared on the cover of the program of a memorial service for him in 1933. The Forbes Library, Northampton, Massachusetts, has searched its Coolidge collection many times for this.

 "Two of the gravest general dangers to survival are the desire for comfort and a passive outlook."

-U.S. Army Ranger Handbook

 "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too."

-W. Somerset Maugham

 "One fact stands out in bold relief in the history of man's attempts for betterment. When compulsion is used only resentment is aroused, and the end is not gained. Only through moral suasion and appeal to men's reason can a movement succeed."

-Samuel Gompers

 "Each of us has a natural right -- from God to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties?"

-Bastiat

 The debate over gun control, for or against the private ownership of firearms can go on and on, but it boils down to this: When the government of the United States bans the possession and use of all privately owned firearms and proceeds to confiscate them; there are those who will give in to oppression submissively, and there are those who will resist until they are killed by the government. When these people are killed, they will be labeled as evil outlaws, but in reality they will be the last true defenders of freedom and civil rights. Those that remain; the national and state police forces, the unarmed peasants, and the true evil outlaws with firearms, will come to believe that only the dead have found the true peace that they all foolishly believed would come after this act of oppression.

-Inspired by William Jefferson Clinton, 1992-1996

 "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes...Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides...an unarmed man can be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

-Casare Beccaria

 "If indeed crime is one of the deciding electoral issues of our era, the adherents of gun control won't be deciding much of anything until they figure out a way to also talk in public, credibly, about controlling the criminals."

-Wall Street Journal

THE FACTS

 There are 130 million guns in the U.S., including 75-80 million handguns.

 There are 60-65 million gun owners in the U.S., of whom, 30-35 million own handguns.

 1% of firearms owners and 13% of hangun owners have used their guns for self-defense.

 The annual criminal gun use is less than 0.2% of firearms and less than 0.4% of handguns.

 About 99.8% of firearms and more than 99.4% of handguns will not be used to commit violent crimes in any given year.

 States with right-to-carry laws have lower overall violent crime rates than other states. The homicide rate is 28% lower and the firearm homicide rate is 33% lower and the handgun homicide rate is 38% lower.

 Criminoligist Gary Kleck's survey study indicates at least 2.5 million protective uses of firearms each year in the U.S. (four times the reported number of violent crimes committed with firearms). In fact, most protective uses do not involve the actual discharge of a firearm.

 85% of the firearms banned in Clinton's assault gun ban were rifles, despite the fact that rifles are the type of firearm least often used in crime. In 1994, rifles were used in only 3% of homicides, which is less than knives (13%), bare hands (5%), and clubs (4%).

 Only 2-3% of the firearms used to murder police officers during the past decade were "assault weapons."

 No law enforcement officer has ever been killed because a handgun bullet defeated a protective vest.

 93% of career criminals get their guns from other than gun stores, mostly by theft or black market deals.

 Annual fatal firearms accident numbers are down 56% since the all-time high in 1930 despite the fact that the number of firearms owned has quadrupled.

 In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted a virtual ban on handguns. By 1991, D.C.'s homicide rate had tripled, while the U.S. rate rose 12%.

 "Where there is a multitude of specific laws, it is a sign that the state is badly governed."

-Isocrates, Greek orator

Were our Founding Fathers Liberals or Conservatives?

In politics, a Liberal is a person who advocates change, while a Conservative, is a person who opposes change.

Based on that definition, there is no one more liberal than a Revolutionary.

At the time when Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and all the others were engineering a revolution against Great Britain, they could be considered nothing short of arch liberals. They were advocating one of the greatest political changes the world had ever witnessed. However, once the war had been won, and when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were finally ratified, these men became arch conservatives.

Can a person be a Liberal and a Conservative at the same time?

Consider that a liberal government is elected, and once in office, they attempt to abridge a number of rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. You, being opposed to any abridgment of your rights, are a Conservative, but at the same time you are advocating change, in that you advocate a change in governments, a very liberal position. This is exactly the same position in which our Founding Fathers found themselves in 1776. Conservatism often results in liberal actions, whereas Liberalism, seldom if ever, results in conservative action. So, the answer to the preceding question is no. However a person can be a Conservative and liberal at the same time.

In American politics, the true measure is that those who advocate individual rights, and self-determination, are considered Conservatives, and those who advocate government control through financial dependence are Liberals. Another measure is that Conservatives are not afraid to stand on their own two feet, and trust others to be able to do the same. Liberals on the other hand are afraid of everything, trust no one but the government, and consider no one capable of self-determination, so they are compelled to try and protect everyone from themselves.

So, in answer to the original question, our Founding Fathers were about as conservative as it is possible to be. (JP)

 "Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants."

- William Penn

 "Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow."

- Elias Boudinot, president of the Continental Congress, later a congressman from NJ, and president of the American Bible Society

 "He is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who set himself with the greatest firmness to bear down on profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy of God, I scruple not to call him an enemy to his country."

- John Witherspoon, the only clergyman in the Continental Congress

 "Providence has given our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers."

- John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, one of three men most responsible for our Constitution

 "Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure (and) which insures to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments."

- Charles Carrol, signer of the Declaration of Independence

 "The rights essential to happiness.... We claim them from a higher source - from the King of kings and Lord of all the earth."

John Dickinson, signed the Constitution and a member of the Continental Congress

 "The only foundation for... a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments."

-Benjamin Rush, signed the Declaration of Independence