Some quote whoring here. Toll comes into town tomorrow. I need to get something done other than wash. the Metro will come back alive very soon. Manyana it looks like. I'v been thinking of Kate before I go to sleep. I miss her but it wasn't meant for that time. I hope she is doing well.
We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves.
- George Matthew Adams
"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."
"Wear a gun to someone else's house, you're saying, 'I'll defend this home as if it were my own.' When your guests see you carry a weapon, you're telling them, 'I'll defend you as if you were my own family.' And anyone who objects levels the deadliest insult possible: 'I don't trust you unless you're rendered harmless'!
... Whenever personal arms have fallen out of fashion, society has become something no sane person would consider worth defending. The same thing happens to individual: they start rotting too, becoming helpless, disdaining to lift a finger because it's 'beneath them.' They're no longer fit to live and are simply proving that they know it!"
L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach
(Oh I just love this. The NRA paraphrased Seneca the younger. I love it.)
Quemadmoeum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.
A sword is never a killer, it's a tool in the killer's hands.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca "the Younger" (4 B.C.E-65 C.E.)
To be honest, I don't much care if rape is natural or not. So is killing in self-defense. If it's "natural" for a man to rape me, it's equally "natural" for me to kill him for trying. Nature or nurture, he's out of the gene pool if he tries it.
Janis Cortese, letter to the editor, Salon Magazine.
That rifle on the wall of the laborer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there!
George Orwell, 1940, in the democratic socialist weekly "Tribune," quoted in "Orwell: The Authorized Biography," by Michael Shelden
When you disarm your subjects, however, 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.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an 'equalizer.' Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never neededbut do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.
If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the governmentand a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.
Edward Abbey, Abbey's Road, p. 39 (Plume, 1979)
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 murderedone does not usually lead to the otherbut it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed.
Daniel D. Polsby, Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 73, Number 3, Fall 1997
At what exact point, then, should one resist the communists? How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? Or, if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand... the Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers... and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.
Alexander Solzhenicyn, Gulag Archipelago
We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves.
- George Matthew Adams
"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."
"Wear a gun to someone else's house, you're saying, 'I'll defend this home as if it were my own.' When your guests see you carry a weapon, you're telling them, 'I'll defend you as if you were my own family.' And anyone who objects levels the deadliest insult possible: 'I don't trust you unless you're rendered harmless'!
... Whenever personal arms have fallen out of fashion, society has become something no sane person would consider worth defending. The same thing happens to individual: they start rotting too, becoming helpless, disdaining to lift a finger because it's 'beneath them.' They're no longer fit to live and are simply proving that they know it!"
L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach
(Oh I just love this. The NRA paraphrased Seneca the younger. I love it.)
Quemadmoeum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.
A sword is never a killer, it's a tool in the killer's hands.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca "the Younger" (4 B.C.E-65 C.E.)
To be honest, I don't much care if rape is natural or not. So is killing in self-defense. If it's "natural" for a man to rape me, it's equally "natural" for me to kill him for trying. Nature or nurture, he's out of the gene pool if he tries it.
Janis Cortese, letter to the editor, Salon Magazine.
That rifle on the wall of the laborer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there!
George Orwell, 1940, in the democratic socialist weekly "Tribune," quoted in "Orwell: The Authorized Biography," by Michael Shelden
When you disarm your subjects, however, 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.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an 'equalizer.' Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never neededbut do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.
If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the governmentand a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.
Edward Abbey, Abbey's Road, p. 39 (Plume, 1979)
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 murderedone does not usually lead to the otherbut it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed.
Daniel D. Polsby, Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 73, Number 3, Fall 1997
At what exact point, then, should one resist the communists? How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? Or, if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand... the Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers... and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.
Alexander Solzhenicyn, Gulag Archipelago
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
vuokko:
Wow, that person wasn't back for long! "What'd you do?!?!"
vuokko:
Oh, yeah, I forgot to say-- he didn't agrue anything about Kinsey's research methodology. He hadn't even heard of the Kinsey Report. He just said that he didn't know very many gay people and he never did anything with another guy, so it must be wrong. We call this "Proof by Example" and it usually prooves nothing except that the person trying to use it is clutching at straws.