The Guns Of August History Quotes

Once the divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

If I'd been a cowboy, it might've ended well.
Somewhere on the ramble, I'm sure I'd have to sell
My guns along the highway. My coins to the table
To make a gambler's double, I'd double debts to pay.
Prob'ly shrink and slink away, It mightn't've ended well.

What If I'd been a sailor? I think it might've ended well.
From August to May
For a searat of man drifting through eternal blue, aboard the finest Debris.
I might've called the shanties. From daybreak to storm's set, lines stay Taught, over rhythm unbroken.
But, oh, there's a schism unspoken, a mighty calling of the lee.
An absentminded Pirate, unaccustomed to the sea;
To the land, a traitor. I think it mightn't've ended well.

What might've worked for me? What might've ended well?
Soldier, to bloody sally forth through hell?
Teacher of glorious stories to tell?
Man of gold, or stores to sell?
Lover to a gentle belle?
Maybe a camel;
A seashell.
What mightn't've been a life where it mightn't've ended well? ~ Dylan Thomas

And I know Blake had a bunch of fucking problems going on the night he was shot. But Mouse here made sure the hired guns were dead before they could hurt him. I don't know if I get to call him a hero, if that's allowed, because I'm a bad man, and he was my friend. But he was a hero to me. ~ Debra Anastasia

Let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human beings is brought about by what we do to one another. It is humankind, not God, that had invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of other instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, of the innocent young man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden section of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences. ~ Francis S. Collins

I don't care if they're licensed legal firearms, people who are not highly trained putting guns in their hands is a recipe for disaster. So I'll train our officers that there is a concealed carry law, but when somebody turns with a firearm in their hand the officer does not have an obligation to wait to get shot to return fire and we're going to have tragedies as a result of that. I'm telling you right up front. ~ Garry McCarthy

I wished I were like those soldiers in films who run out of bullets and toss away their guns as though they would never again have any use for them, or like runaways in the desert who, rather than ration the water in the gourd, yield to thirst and swill away, then drop their gourd in their tracks. Instead, I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I'd incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons. But I also knew that in Mafalda's superstitious world, anticipating the worst was as sure a way of preventing it from happening.

When we went on a walk one night and he told me that he'd soon be heading back home, I realized how futile my alleged foresight had been. Bombs never fall on the same spot; this one, for all my premonitions, fell exactly in my hideaway. ~ Andre Aciman

Guns are part of the Constitution, and no one is willing to have that tough conversation with Congress and the Senate and the president to say maybe that's got to change. People talk about it - but I mean actual change. ~ George Stroumboulopoulos

As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic. ~ Pete Townshend

growing up we always had a pack of dogs, usually four
held in prestige among many familiars
them and a few cats we let indoors
though we loved every bird, mouse, tadpole, crayfish
froze in a spring frost we grew more conscious of weather
wide skies read power lines hum dove coos
the leaves turnt dirt melt change on the breeze creaks
and rain the gravel trucks of spring full by slow
then empties in summer barrelling too fast past our hillbilly stake
mother threw potatoes later hard to explain
to the police who got called in from a county over
drove out to say, "ma'am, you can't throw potatoes at trucks"
then all polite as we stood with our pack and stuck to our guns ~ Cecily Nicholson

We have a shotgun we inherited from my father-in-law, a paranoid Englishman living in Texas. I have a .22 Marlin rifle, similar to the one Annie Oakley had, and my husband has a .357 Magnum pistol. All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns. ~ Bonnie Jo Campbell

There is a general kind of praying which fails for lack of precision. It is as if a regiment of soldiers should all fire off their guns anywhere. Possibly somebody would be killed, but the majority of the enemy would be missed. ~ Charles Spurgeon

For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. ~ Stephen King

America ... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Wraith snorted. "Cowards. Seriously. Who brings a gun to a knife fight? That's cheating."
"You don't have a gun?" Kynan asked.
Wraith made a face of digust. "It's not very sporting to shoot people."
"So you're saying that you didn't shoot the people who shot you?"
"Hell, yeah, I shot them. ~ Larissa Ione

Could he hold up a hand, tell them he had spent a thousand years learning this trick and others, tell them of the guns and the blood that had blessed them? Not with his mouth. But his hands could speak their own tale. ~ Stephen King

To put up with ... distortions and to stick to one's guns come what may - this is the ... gift of leadership. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family. ~ Steven Pinker

Don't forget your great guns, which are the most respectable arguments of the rights of kings. ~ Frederick The Great

All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. ~ Neal Stephenson

The sight of so many guns, mostly deer rifles and duck guns but with a smattering of black rifles and riot shotguns, made him glad that this was going down in a rural area where people still had their heads screwed on right about personal defense. ~ Larry Correia

I don't know how anybody can say that who looks at what's happening to our young people and what's happening to our country, all because of guns. The NRA is putting themselves in a position where people will no longer trust them. They've been trusted in the past, but now their credibility is on the line. ~ Joycelyn Elders

I love everybody that's with me. All these dudes from Paterson - nothing happen to none of us. We won't go to jail. I make sure we don't. We don't stand on no corners. Ain't nobody carrying when they ain't supposed to be carrying. We don't pose with guns in the videos; we don't leave guns in the house. You'll never see Fetty Wap posting no videos with no guns. ~ Fetty Wap

AK 47, is perfect copy, yes? Every detail. Like real thing. Yes. Kalashnikov. Your boy, he be happy for Uncle Sante, no?"
"I'm sorry, Sante. It's really nice of you, but I don't want Sofus playing with guns."
Conversation between George Hanson and Sante
In The Shadow of Sadd ~ Steen Langstrup

Had I guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm.

I had run him up from the quarter deck to trade with his own yard-arm;

I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw,

And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw;

I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot in the rocking dark,

I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark;

I had lapped him round with cocoa husk, and drenched him with the oil,

And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil;

I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasseled his beard in the mesh,

And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks. ~ Bob Dylan

Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it 'Her'. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination. ~ Andrea Dworkin

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies. ~ Tom Robbins

I'm against gun control. It's not that I like guns, it's just that allowing Americans to have guns will increase the chances that a bunch of rednecks will blow each other's heads off. ~ Bobcat Goldthwait

If you have a truly complex system," he says, "then the exact patterns are not repeatable. And yet there are themes that are recognizable. In history, for example, you can talk about 'revolutions,' even though one revolution might be quite different from another. So we assign metaphors. It turns out that an awful lot of policy-making has to do with finding the appropriate metaphor. Conversely, bad policy-making almost always involves finding inappropriate metaphors. For example, it may not be appropriate to think about a drug 'war,' with guns and assaults. ~ M. Mitchell Waldrop

To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used. ~ Richard Dawkins

When I speak out against the guns or against the big corporations, some of my friends say, 'Oh Yoko, be careful. These people have all the power.' But, you know, most people don't speak out because they are frightened. ~ Yoko Ono

I remembered a numeric code. He could have been using counters to help him write in it."
"Or," said Roshar, "your father will read the note, see one code when he expects another, and will send someone to the station, where there's a dead body."
"If so," Arin said, "then we're no worse off than we were before."
"Oh yes, we are. The general will know the letter's a ploy, and will do the opposite of what we want. He'll ignore the main road. He'll take back roads through the forests where our guns would be of dubious use and we wouldn't have the advantage of height. You know this."
Arin shut his mouth, glancing uneasily at Kestrel. Yes. He had known this, as had she. She felt worse for his effort to make her mistake seem smaller. He knew its true size.
Roshar leaned back in his creaking chair. His eyes slid from Arin to Kestrel, black as lacquer, the green lines around them fresh. "Can you tell me anything more cheerful than all this? ~ Marie Rutkoski

In the stories after the war, all the resistance heroes were dashing, sinewy types who could construct machine guns from paperclips. And the Germans either raised their godlike blond heads through open tank hatches to watch broken cities scroll past, or else were psychopathic, sex-crazed torturers of beautiful Jewesses. Where did the boy fit in? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn't it? ~ Anthony Doerr

It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The lingering effects of war can inspire callousness even after the guns have fallen silent. Many of us have seen the notorious clip from 60 Minutes in which Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, declared that the price of half a million dead children as a result of the sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s had been worth it. ~ Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Buy ammunition! Remember that a man cannot have too many books, too many wines, or too much ammunition. Our adversaries on the other side are reaching for the excuse of lead poisoning. If they can push that idea through, you may wind up still owning your guns but without anything to shoot in them. ~ Jeff Cooper

Make no mistake: I'm all about guns! I just love the legal incongruities our national discourse has spawned, like I can buy a shotgun any time of day without a serious background check, but if I need something for my sniffles, it's six forms of ID and complete school transcripts. The government has essentially created a system where if I want to clear a head cold, the easiest cure is to blow my brains out. ~ Tim Dorsey

The ultimate check against government tyranny is an informed electorate who will elect people who believe in limited government. I don't want to embrace the idea we want people to take to the streets with guns. I want people to go to the voting booth and check an out of control government by electing conservatives. ~ Lindsey Graham

Srinagar is a medieval city dying in a modern war. It is empty streets, locked shops, angry soldiers and boys with stones. It is several thousand military bunkers, four golf courses, and three book-shops. It is wily politicians repeating their lies about war and peace to television cameras and small crowds gathered by the promise of an elusive job or a daily fee of a few hundred rupees. It is stopping at sidewalks and traffic lights when the convoys of rulers and their patrons in armored cars, secured by machine guns, rumble on broken roads. It is staring back or looking away, resigned. Srinagar is never winning and never being defeated. ~ Basharat Peer

They [Cops] were living in the media age, and in the media age, cops didn't get to fire their weapons. Cops were honored if they got themselves killed in the line of duty, but they were never suppose to draw their guns, not even in self-defense. ~ Lisa Gardner

You don't stockpile guns because 'you never know'. You stockpile guns because you do know. And while you may be wrong, your shitload of guns says you no longer welcome debate on the subject. ~ Eric Sennevoight

He spoke on rising toes, on rolling ankles, he spoke with forward tilt, with lifted shoulders, with forefinger pointing and fist punching. He did verbal pirouettes, he did elongated sentences, he let clauses gather at the river and foam until they found spittle release. He spoke hushed, he spoke his big points in whispers, then drove them in with urgent balletic waves of arm and extended eyebrow as he said the same thing again only louder. He was not then a guns and bombs nationalist. He was the more dangerous kind. He was a poems and stories one. ~ Niall Williams

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

The problem is that we've got a sense of humor and (Republicans have) got guns. Will we die laughing? ~ Thomas M. Disch

There are plenty of people who believe that Elvis is alive, or that aliens occasionally land here to do highly personal things to people, or that the whole idea of evolution is a conspiracy of godless scientists. Almost all of these people can vote and some of them have got guns. ~ Terry Pratchett

The man knows he's a target. He's very careful. The'll find the guns.'
Kolya responded with a mournful fart, low and solemn as a single note of a baritone horn. ~ David Benioff