Before all else, be armed.
Armed Quotes
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.
When you disarm your subjects you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you.
The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.
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.
