P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

[T]he Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers? Or maybe the people in Texas were attacked because of child abuse. But, if child abuse was the issue, why didn't Janet Reno tear-gas Woody Allen?

I don't know how you talk about the founding of America, and what became of the United States, without talking about religious doctrine.

The right wing always mobilizes around constitutional amendments: the right to bear arms, school prayer.

The United States of America was formed to honor the word of God.

I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This is not for law enforcement. This is for us. And, in fact, when you read that Constitution and the Founding Fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny.

It's no secret that the Democrats and liberal media would love to take away our guns and mandate every aspect of our lives, but I refuse to let them get away with that.

Resolved unanimously that a well regulated militia, composed of gentlemen, freeholders, and other freemen, is the natural strength and only stable security of a free government …

The founding fathers used the well regulated militias to suppress rebellions.

Opinions of the founding generation were scattered all across the spectrum on the question of the assistance government should give religion.

The great leaders of the American Revolution were determined to remove political support from every religious establishment.

The passage of the 1st Amendment is the single most dramatic and significant turning point of a revolutionary transition to religious freedom.

I don't want my marriage or my guns registered in Washington. And if people have an opinion, it's a religious opinion that is heartly felt, obviously they should be allowed to practice that, and no government should interfere with them.

Our Founding Fathers believed strongly in gun rights for citizens.

The final line in the Second Amendment says, 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' That means not by the president, not by Congress.

I think the most grievous threat that we have today is this imperialistic judiciary, this judicial monarchy that has it wrong on what the First Amendment's about and has an objective to create religious sterility in the public square, which is wholly inconsistent with the Founding Fathers' view.

If President Obama or any president ever attempts gun confiscation in America, there should be and will be a second civil war.

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

Our Founding Fathers knew that without Second Amendment freedom, all of our freedoms could be in jeopardy.

People - particularly in the Southeast, Georgia, my district, all across the state - they don't want the federal government to have the ability, at times whenever the federal government wants to declare an emergency, to start going around and confiscating people's guns.

Since the time of the Founding Fathers, and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy.

Unfortunately, there are people in America, there are people in politics, there are people in positions of authority, who want to forcibly unarm, and force in to helplessness, American citizens.

Of the five rights listed in the First Amendment. - religion, speech, press, assembly, petition - the very first right protected is freely exercising our religion.

The intensive and concerted effort to exclude references to religion or God from public places is an attack on our founding principles. It's an attempt to bolster a growing reliance on the government--especially the judiciary--as the source of our rights. But if our rights are not unalienable, if they don't come from a source higher than ourselves, then they're malleable at the will of the state. This is a prescription for tyranny.

The Founding Fathers did not believe the primary purpose of their guns was to hunt ducks, but to keep the government in line within the bounds of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers said that armed citizens are a bulwark against a tyrant in the White House.

Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers.