Toussaint Louverture Quotes

Free men have arms; slaves do not.

To disarm the people—that was the best and most effective way to enslave them.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave.

Libertarians and most conservatives boldly and nobly take a stand for our right to keep and bear arms. Not so we can go duck hunting, but so we can defend ourselves and our families from invasion. And so we can, if necessary, defend our liberty from the possibility of a tyrannical state.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

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.

As members of the oldest civil rights organization in the nation, NRA members know tyranny when we see it.

If the government decides to become a tyrannical government, our guns are to protect us against that.

A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it's off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves.

There are two kinds of rebellion. The first is one in which the slave demands something that the tyrant has got. The second is one in which he demands something that the tyrant has not got.

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.

We will defend ourselves, and we have full rights to do so. If the authorities try to destroy us, we have the right to rise up. Sooner or later this will happen.

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

I will always vote on the side of freedom and our right to keep and bear arms.

I would prefer to be a citizen of an independent country rather than Emperor of an enslaved one.

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense?

The very purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop the government from disallowing people the means to defend themselves against tyranny. Any proposal to abuse executive power and infringe upon gun rights must be repelled with the stiffest legislative force possible.

I would not like a king who could obey.

Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.