Lot of good sig lines from members here and some other recent events got me thinking it would be nice to start a collection of classic quotes.  I have gone looking for some on occasion and they have not been handy (or my google fu more likely just sucks). I'll try to do one a day. Obviously none of it is mine so citations made wherever available.

Few to kick off:

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. - George Orwell Richard Grenier

Summum ius summa iniuria. (The more law, the less justice.) - Cicero, De Officiis, I, 33

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous its laws. - Tacitus

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country 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 of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, October 10, 1787

Bibamus moriendum est. (Death's unavoidable; let's have a drink.) - Seneca the Elder


ETA: Should have had this from the start...

I can't control what you put in your post, but we lost a good thread recently because people weren't turning on their mental filters and other members weren't self policing the few idiots that ruined it for everyone else.  If the mods have to get involved, the mods don't want to deal with threads that take too much of their time when they have how many others to watch, so of course they will shut down threads with too many offenses.

This is not a thread to try to be funny or edgy or to push your own agenda. Classic quotes.

I am not saying there can't be tongue in cheek quotes or quotes from other members, but keep it in line with the CoC and keep it tasteful.

The whole CoC needs to be observed.  If you are not sure what you have is CoC compliant, don't post it.

If you don't like it, go start your own thread.


Also, if you see something you know is not cited correctly or is lacking a cite for who said it, please, offer your input.

When you're salary, you're going to have to learn a few things. Like eating your hot food cold and cold food hot...

NUTS !!

"We've been looking for the enemy for some time now. We've finally found him. We're surrounded. That simplifies things."  - Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesty_Puller

Mayor of Hiroshima  "What the fuck was that"

My sig line

The 2 in my sig line

"In knife making everyone gets cut and everyone gets burned." Devin Thomas

Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. It's not even hard.

Schneier's Law

At one point I started a list...here are some (note that several have not been verified accurate, and some posters are noting that they believe a few to be definitely wrong...so take these with a grain of salt and verify before using them on your own!):


"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." - Albert Einstein

"Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty teeth and keystone under independence." - George Washington

“Adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it.”  -Unknown

"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." - Thomas Jefferson

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty." – Thomas Jefferson

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong” - Voltaire

"Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.”

“An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." - Lt.Col. Jeff Cooper

"They will never outlaw all of your guns at once. But every 'reasonable' control they can impose without your resistance gives them one more bit of leverage to make gun ownership for you and your children and your grandchildren as difficult as possible." - David Kopel, Author

"The further a society shifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it." - George Orwell

"Any politician who won't trust you with the weapon of your choice, clearly cannot be trusted with the power he desires over your life."  -Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith

"The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."- Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting in Silveira v. Lockyer.

"How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of..."  - Dr. Suzanna Gratia Hupp (she lost both parents in the 1991 Luby’s cafeteria massacre)

"If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed." - George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

"Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence.... From the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurrences, 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... A free people ought to be armed." - George Washington

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become the unwitting victims of the darkness." -Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980)

"Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die." -  Dwight D. Eisenhower

"With guns in the hands of the public, sure there will be tragedies, but without them there will be genocides." – Unknown

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"Be the change you want to see in the world."

-Joseph Stalin

In before Abe Lincoln and dildos

One more:

“And how we burned in the 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 and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, 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 left 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 would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

In for inspiration.

I've always liked the sig line from some member whose name I don't recall, quote probably from Thucydides, goes something like:

"the country who places a great distinction between its soldiers and its scholars will have its wars fought by morons and its government run by cowards"

That was from his "I had a dream" speech, right?

If you have it and you know you have it, then you have it. If you have it and don't know you have it, you don't have it. If you don't have it but you think you have it, then you have it. - Jackie Gleason

Drinking removes warts and pimples. Not from me. But from those I look at. - Jackie Gleason

I have no use for humility. I am a fellow with an exceptional talent. - Jackie Gleason

I only made $200 a week and I had to buy my own bullets. - Jackie Gleason

It is a good one.    

Wiki claims it is often misattributed to Thucydides (doesn't say why), but that it is actually a misquote from Sir William Francis Butler, Charles George Gordon (1889), p. 85, where it reads: "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards."

I think the alleged misquote reads better.

In before fake Jefferson and Hirohito quotes.

ETA apparently not lol

Damn. Some good ones.

Lots of good ones so far in the thread.  Me like.

Some of those are unfortunately flat out false.

ETA the poster did make mention of them not all being proven true

"Everyone judges a book by its cover. That's why books have covers."

runcible from AR15.com

If your aunt had balls ,she'd be your uncle -Papaw

Better than a sharp stick in your eye-Mom

And we already have someone attributing an alleged Gandhi quote to Stalin.

Won't be able to chase them all down. Hopefully people reading can self police and offer corrections where they are needed.

"Can't turn a ho into a housewife, ho's don't act right." - Ludacris

"For every action there is an equal but opposite government program."

-Ambrose Bierce

all of the above quotes are by Robert Anson Heinlein.

I've definitely quoted, "Summum ius, summum iniuria," quite a few times.  Another good one in that vein is Ulpian's legal maxim, "Suum cuique."

I like my sig line, too.

There's Blake, "One law for the lion and the ox is oppression."

Ecclesiastes 10:2: "A wise man’s heart inclines him toward the right, but a fool’s heart toward the left."

One of my favourite political works has a ton of good ones:

"We are now so stultified in our thinking and so priggish in our expressions that it becomes unavoidably offensive to tell the truth" --Johann Georg Hamann

"In dictatorships one has to howl with the wolves...and in democracies one has to bleat with the sheep." --Herman Funke

"To flatter the vices of the people is even more cowardly and more dirty than to flatter the vices of the great." --Charles Peguy

"Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either psychopaths or mountebanks." --Goethe

"In certain historical periods one has to make the full circle of follies in order to return to reason." --Benjamin Constant de Rebeque

"He who wants to get to the source must swim against the current." --Stanislaw Lec

"As was said long afterward, the founders of the Republic in general, whether Federalist or Republican, feared democracy more than they feared original sin" --Charles A. and Mary Beard

"The French Revolution was an insurrection of mules and horses against men, conducted by apes with the throats of parrots." --Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine

"The butcher is held in great esteem in Harmony" --Francois Fourier

"Capitalism is the uneven distribution of wealth, and socialism the even distribution of poverty." --Winston Churchill

"Once in our lives we wanted to make the people happy and this is something for which we will never forgive ourselves." --An Old Russian Leftist to Nadejda Mandelstam

"...for the few shall save the many, or the many are to fall still to be wrangling in a noisy grave." --E. A. Robinson, Demos

"A planned economy is implicit in the spirit of democracy." --The City of Man (1940)

"The lights are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them again in our lifetime." --Sir Edward Grey, August 13, 1914 (How truly and lastingly prophetic that one was!)

"A child hates the person who gives him everything he wants." --African Proverb

“LIfe's Journey is not to arrive at the grave safely, in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting “Holy shit, what a ride!” - Hunter S Thompson


"I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you f--- with me, I'll kill you all."
After the initial Iraq invasion, "Chaos" (his radio call sign) sent home his tanks and artillery and used the "carrot and the stick" with Iraqi tribal leaders. Gen James Mattis

"The movie director Sam Peckinpah was right. Fighting and fucking is what it's all about. Everything else is a surrogate"


“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” -Tolkien


"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse." - John Stuart Mill



Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect, and is intended to. –Theodore Dalrymple

"The idea that an extremist hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us and is thus more disturbed to see it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime, he is a good citizen driven to despair."- H.L. Mencken

"The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men." - Samuel Adams, November 4, 1775

The people are masters of both Congress and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it!
- Abraham Lincoln

"The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits." - Plutarch

"Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule."
-Jefferson Davis

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu

Patton said something like; kill em all

That's not a direct quote.

Ed

The Soviets are our adversary. Our enemy is the Navy,” General Curtis LeMay, United States Air Force

You can't fix stupid!

If I quit my job I can post whore more.

--Aimless

fixed

Tag.  I've always believed one path to wisdom and discernment is via the writings of wise men.

I still aspire to wisdom some day, but at age 52 I fear time is running short.

Jeez

No Churchill quotes ?


"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

"If I must choose between righteousness and peace, I choose righteousness".  -Theodore Roosevelt

"The courage of your friends brings you justice, the courage of your enemies brings you honor."  -Arabic

"May honor be your leader, and love be your friend. May luck be your lover, until we meet again"  -Unknown  And I'm sure I got the first part wrong.. but it works.

"It's not always how many you kill, but who you kill." - Unknown

I still can’t help wondering how we can explain away what to me is the greatest miracle of all and which is recorded in history. No one denies there was such a man, that he lived and that he was put to death by crucifixion. Where … is the miracle I spoke of? Well consider this and let your imagination translate the story into our own time—possibly to your own home town. A young man whose father is a carpenter grows up working in his father’ shop. One day he puts down his tools and walks out of his father’s shop. He starts preaching on street corners and in the nearby countryside, walking from place to place, preaching all the while, even though he is not an ordained minister. He never gets farther than an area perhaps 100 miles wide at the most. He does this for three years. Then he is arrested, tried and convicted. There is no court of appeal, so he is executed at age 33 along with two common thieves. Those in charge of his execution roll dice to see who gets his clothing—the only possessions he has. His family cannot afford a burial place for him so he is interred in a borrowed tomb. End of story? No, this uneducated, property-less young man has, for 2,000 years, had a greater effect on the world than all the rulers, kings, emperors; all the conquerors, generals and admirals, all the scholars, scientists and philosophers who have ever lived—all of them put together. How do we explain that—unless He really was what He said He was?

- Ronald Reagan

   

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

-Clarence Darrow. Often misapplied to Mark Twain.

"I believe oil is the magical coating you seek."  (Said to people complaining that DI AR15’s have reliability problems.)

Some people are like slinkys. Totally useless but fun to push down a flight of stairs.

"it can be done cheaply, quickly or properly pick two
Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten.

"No combat ready unit was every ready for inspection, and no inspection ready unit was
ever ready for combat."

Bayonets:  Because you can never run out of KNIFE 

3 shots are a 'feel good' moment, ten shots put the reality into things.

Donald J.Trump @realDonaldTrump
Hillary said "I really deplore the tone and inflammatory rhetoric of his campaign."
I deplore the death and destruction she caused - stupidity.

'This Guy Is Such a Total Pussy --- It's Stunning' - Lt.Col. Ralph Peters talking about obama

"They’ve got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.” -- Creighton W. Abrams during the Battle of the Bulge in WWII

"Are you guys ready? Let's roll." --Todd Beamer's last words before he led Americans on United Airlines Flight 93
to attack a cockpit controlled by terrorists

"Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell." — William F. Halsey’s response after seeing
the wreckage of Pearl Harbor 

"We view ourselves on the eve of battle. We are nerved for the contest, and must conquer or perish. It is vain to look for
present aid: none is at hand. We must now act or abandon all hope! Rally to the
standard, and be no longer the scoff of mercenary tongues! Be men, be free men,
that your children may bless their father’s name." — Sam Houston in 1836,
before the Battle of Jan Jacinto

"I'll tell you what war is about, you've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting." — U.S. Air
Force General Curtis LeMay"

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the
game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my
life. And that is why I succeed." -- Basketball player, Michael Jordan

"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet." – General James Mattis

"Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong." — Ronald Reagan
after bombing Libya

Don't get upset that you bought your rifle at the same place I get my toilet paper. If it'll make you feel better, my wife
got a deal on her tampons at your LGS.

Trump's election will be the biggest "F—ck You" in human history - Michael Moore

I took down my Rebel flag (which you can't buy one-bay any more), the Gadsden flag and peeled the NRA sticker off the front door.
I disconnected my home alarm system and quit the candy-ass Neighborhood Watch.
I bought two Pakistani flags and put one at each corner of the front yard. Then
I purchased the black flag of ISIS (which you CAN buy on e-bay) and put it in the CENTER of the yard.
Now, the local police, sheriff, FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, Secret
Service and other agencies are all watching the house 24/7.
I've NEVER felt safer and I'm saving $69.95 a month that ADT charged me.
Plus, I bought burkas for my family when we shop or travel.
Everyone moves out of the way and security won't pat us down.

"A world of information, literally at our fingertips, and we still post bullshit that could have been checked out with the slightest bit of effort. The issue isn't lack of information resources, it's lack of will."

- Bohr_Adam

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What you allow, is what will continue. - Unknown

If you permit it, you promote it. - Unknown

Tolerance should really only be a passing attitude: it should lead to appreciation. To tolerate is to offend. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Brought Theodore Roosevelt's saying to mind: Speak softly, and carry a big stick.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. - H. L. Mencken

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable. - H. L. Mencken

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. - Aldo Leopold

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.  - Ferris Bueller

This too shall pass. - Persian adage

Humanius est deridere vitam quam deplorare. (Laugh at life, don't cry over it.) - Seneca the Younger, De Tranquillitate Animi, III, 8