Armed Quotes

We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter but with guns.

Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society’s weapons policy might be one of the institutional arrangements that contributes to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being […]

I am not one of those who believe that a great army is the means of maintaining peace, because if you build up a great profession those who form parts of it want to exercise their profession.

If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend […]

It is good for the kings and the generals that armies should be loyal to the point that they function like machines, not like men.

But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail.

Sir, it is not the natural limitations of this globe that I object to; it is the pantywaist nincompoops who rule it – These ridiculous regulations offend me. That a free citizen should have to go before a committee, hat in hand, and pray for permission to bear arms – fantastic! Arm your daughter, sir, […]

So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride – the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race […]

When a strong man armed, keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace. (Luke 11:21)

Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, […]