Politicians From New York City

"Why do they want to disarm the people? Well, they want to disarm the people on the assumption that we are not responsible enough to be trusted with the means to defend ourselves--regardless of the truth that our Founders thought that this is an essential prerequisite and precondition of liberty."

"The First Amendment isn't about free thought and free opinion and free belief. The First Amendment is about free exercise--the carrying into practice of religious principles, and beliefs, and convictions."

"There's not a single thing on offer in this all-too-temporary world for which you should ever sell your soul."

"Harden our hearts to the innocents in the womb, and we have hardened our hearts to the need for compassion, and mercy, and fellow-feeling, and charity, and decency in this world."

"The heart of government, coated with whatever velvet gloves you want to put on it, is a mailed fist of force and coercion."

"The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal."

"Black Americans make up 10 or 11% of the population, but they account now for something of 40 to 45% of all the abortions. This is a privileged position that I'm not sure anyone in their right mind would aspire to."

"There are times we don't want to hear about the need to temper our best hopes in order to achieve our most vital security. But we still need to do it. Before we can triumph, we must survive. Before liberty can prevail, the possibility of liberty must be preserved."

"The question isn't whether you have a good master or a bad master. It's to be your own master. That is the dignity of humanity."

"You can't have it both ways. Either our rights come from God, as our Declaration of Independence says, or they come from human choice. If they come from human choice, then our whole way of life is meaningless, it has no foundation."

"How does it secure the blessings of liberty to our posterity, to those generations yet unborn, to kill them, aborting them in the womb?"

"There can be no self-government without self-discipline. There can be no self-government without self-control. There can be no liberty unless it is grounded in moral discipline and the ability to do what is right."

"I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness to go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent the people there. So I certainly wouldn't imitate it."

"The first principle of a Keyes administration, it will apply in foreign policy, it will apply in domestic policy, it will apply everywhere. There is a God, and we are not him! I will not join the Clinton Democrats who worship government as their god! I will not join the Dole Republicans who worship power as their god! I will not join the Forbes Republicans who worship money as their god! I will stand where the founders of this nation stood, and I will give my respect and allegiance to the creator God who is the ground of justice and who is the ground of all our human rights!"

"In the great Declaration of our principles, it didn't say that all men are created equal 'if you so choose.' It said that all are created equal by the power and the will of God, and that we must respect their rights as we respect that will."

"Either you can subscribe to the American creed which says that God endowed us with our rights, or you can subscribe to the abortion creed which says that those rights are the consequences of our mother's will."

"While they complain about candidates pandering to special-interest groups, 217 years of this republic have shown that deep down people want candidates who strive to be all things to all men. People say they want office-seekers who are candid, frank, straightforward, genuine, who tell the truth even when it hurts. Who are on the up-and-up, guileless, unartful, undesigning, unequivocal. But nobody has won running on that platform, including Lincoln, FDR and Reagan, and you will be no exception. Voters elect only candidates who are deceptive, duplicitous, bluffers, cunning, crafty and Machiavellian. That's because voters want politicians like themselves. The media agrees. So why are you out of step? Thus, you've botched your campaign. You're going to lose by a landslide. I accuse you of being politically pure, clean, pristine, impeccable and untarnished. Your very presence embarrasses the system because you don't play by the historic rules."

"In other words, Alan Keyes was an ideal opponent; all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and start planning my swearing-in ceremony. And yet, as the campaign progressed, I found him getting under my skin in a way that few people ever have. When our paths crossed during the campaign, I often had to suppress the rather uncharitable urge to either taunt him or wring his neck."

"A Keyes speech on the moral erosion of America is one of those transcendent experiences where you just have to be there. It's hard to explain how he touches the soul of an audience, and saying that he's 'silver-tongued' (as everyone does) only tarnishes the picture by inadequacy."

"There was no doubt that the man could talk. At the drop of a hat, Mr. Keyes could deliver a grammatically flawless disquisition on virtually any topic. On the stump, he could wind himself up into a fiery intensity, his body rocking, his brow running with sweat, his fingers jabbing the air, his high-pitched voice trembling with emotion as he called the faithful to do battle against the forces of evil."

"It returns us to the dark ages of human oppression, which America was founded to remove humanity from, and it is the whole point of the push for homosexual marriage and homosexual rights. The aim is not compassion for homosexuals, respect for homosexuals and all of this; the aim in the mind of these hardheaded, calculating, leftist, Communist, totalitarians is to destroy the family and to establish the notion that once you have seized power there is no limit whatsoever to what you can do. If you want to tolerate abuses then those abuses can be imposed upon the people. Once you establish that, the abuses are then not going to be confined to egregious outrages like this; those abuses are going to be committed against the whole society and they will in the end include the murder of the masses as has occurred in all Communist regimes that existed."

"If you go down a road that satisfies your personal predilections and relationships and sacrifices the common good of the country, including the elementary institution by which its civilization is sustained, then you're not only derelict in your public duty, you are abandoning your obligation as a human being. And frankly, people throw around words like "crime against humanity", I think that kind of disregard for the God-endowed natural rights of human being is the archetype of all crimes against humanity, and I think we have an entire elite faction that is now committed to committing such a crime against the American people."

"Walter Kasper, a German cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, said: "A democratic state has the duty to respect the will of the people; and it seems clear that, if the majority of the people wants such homosexual unions, the state has a duty to recognize such rights." So if the people of Germany voted tomorrow to renew the Holocaust, would the cardinal say the German state is duty-bound to re-open the death camps? That kind of spurious legalism helped goose-step Germany into Hell in the last century. Do German cardinals now propose to do the same to the Roman Catholic Church in this one? I must assume that Cardinal Kasper would join me in saying, "Forbid it, Almighty God!" He will probably bridle, however, at the temerity of comparing homosexuality to the Holocaust."

"The GOP is poised to nominate a candidate whose life could be used to illustrate the deceitfully seductive quality of sin summarized in the phrase "the glamour of evil.""

"The answer to crime is not gun control, it is law enforcement and self-control."

"Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description — an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations."

"You can't build marriage on a foundation of selfish hedonism, because that would be to promise people only roses, and marriage is also thorns."

"I was asked by one of the reports whether or not I would call Mary Cheney a selfish hedonist. I didn't mention her name. See, one of the articles said I had mentioned her. This is not true. I didn't mentioned her. But leave that aside. All I said was, she had come forward as a lesbian, she identifies herself as someone who engages in homosexual sexuality. I have just said that by definition, it involves selfish hedonism. I can't change that. Now, it might be true [that] the argument I've just given is the best argument in support of the Republican plank on gay marriage that I think can be made. There are lots of other arguments that can be added, but, in principle, that's the best one because we need to understand that marriage is procreational sex, not recreational sex. Now, I want to tell you. If my daughter or anybody else engages in behavior that put them under that descriptive label, I will not consent to lie about it, and I will not tell the American people that I support a plank that requires this logic and then exempt my daughter from the logic that it requires."

"Sex itself only exists in relation to procreation. That's one of the reasons why I sometimes object — and it's just a theoretical objection, but it's worth thinking about — to the whole notion that one calls what people of the same sex do "sexual relations." As a matter of fact, they have precisely turned their back on sexual relations, in order to engage in acts of mutual pleasure that have nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality."

"It is a vocation, parenting, that is not just all about yourself, because it is all about that future you will never see. It is all about that happiness you will never enjoy. It is all about that person who will grow to a maturity, offering to the world a gift, one element of which may reflect a little contribution from yourself. But long before that gift is finally delivered, you will likely have shuffled off this mortal coil, and not be there to enjoy it. [Parenting] represents the possibility, which in the end is at the heart of the perpetuation of all our human community: the possibility that we will not live for ourselves alone, but will feel a deep and true connection, with a future we will never see, with a progeny we will never meet, but who, in our hearts' imaginations, we contemplate, with a sense of responsibility and obligation. Change the understanding of marriage, and you have changed the understanding of our character in such a way as to break our bond with that future, and to undermine that sense of responsibility."

"The gun control mentality is ruthlessly absurd. It suggests that you pass a law which will bind law-abiding citizens — they won't have access to weapons. Now, we know that criminals, by definition, are people who don't obey laws. Therefore, you can pass all the laws that you want, they will still have access to these weapons, just as they have access to illegal drugs and other things right now. That means you end up with a situation in which the law-abiding folks can't defend themselves, and the crooks have all the guns."

"Freedom does not mean doing what you can get away with, doing what you please. It means, instead, having the opportunity to do what you ought to do--for family and for community and for humanity as a whole."

"Sen. Bob Smith has succeeded in amending an upcoming appropriations bill to beat back the latest wave of Clinton administration disrespect for two key elements of a free citizenry -- privacy and the right to keep and bear arms. Senator Smith is to be praised for keeping his eye on some balls that might have been lost in the smoke of scandal and misinformation that the Clinton Administration seems endlessly to emit. Actually, few things could make the need for vigorous defense of 2nd Amendment rights clearer than the ongoing spectacle of Clinton['s] contempt for the citizens he is supposed to serve. For the 2nd Amendment is really in the Constitution to give men like Bill Clinton something to think about when their ambition gets particularly over-inflated. The Founders added the 2nd Amendment so that when, after a long train of abuses, a government evinces a methodical design upon our natural rights, we will have the means to protect and recover our rights. That is why the right to keep and bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights."

"Our success or failure is not in the hands of our leaders. It is in our hands."

"I was reading an article about this case in California, where two lesbians were fighting over the custody of children that genetically were traceable to one, but which the other had raised. You know what? Nobody even thought about or mentioned, nobody asked a simple question about whether the father of those children should have any claim, because, very often in these relationships, they are conducted in such a way and conception occurs in such a way as to intentionally mask who the father might be, so that children must grow up without knowing who their father is. And that means that an incestuous situation could easily arise in our society, it's more than likely to arise--not to mention every other kind of incestuous complication."

"It's in the private places of the heart that freedom is made or unmade by the discipline we create there."

"The Assault Weapons Ban deals with a fictional distinction. You have guns that are exactly the same guns as are banned, in function, that were banned because of the way they look. And you know, that's the whole truth of this policy: it's to make politicians look as if they are doing something, when in point of fact, they are doing nothing."

"There's so much revenue that comes in from a cap-and-trade system that you can really go to a person in a congressional district and get enough votes there by saying, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’"

"I've always said you that need to keep it on the table and you need to look at these things because now people are dying because of this administration. And, you know, that's what -- that's the truth. And they won't change course. They're ignoring the Congress. They keep signing -- these signing statements, which mean that he's decided not to enforce the law. This is as close as we've ever come to a dictatorship."

"First, there are good people out there; they just don’t make so much of a racket. Second, if you don’t make waves, then the bad guys don’t get washed overboard. And third, nobody bothers to bad-mouth you unless they’re afraid of you. So think of it as kind of a compliment."

"The more I have been attacked for my views and actions, the more I've stood up to it, and the more support I have received."

"I have to say that after chemotherapy, Barbara Boxer just isn't that scary anymore."

"I think I am a goner. If I die, I die a true American; and what grieves me most is, thinking that I've been murdered by a set of Irish - by Morrissey in particular."

"He's basically a romantic comedian. …. He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life, and I have no intention of owning a weapon, although I was a master sharpshooter at West Point on both the Garand, the Springfield rifle and the machine-gun."

"Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow? He must be a little nuts. I mean he just isn’t well screwed on is he? Isn’t that the problem?"

"Suffering. That was the key."

"If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms insists upon a firefight, give them a firefight. Just remember, they're wearing flak jackets and you're better off shooting for the head."

"Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests. ... They've got a big target on there, ATF. Don't shoot at that, because they've got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots. ... Kill the sons of bitches."

"What I did was restate the law. I was talking about a situation in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes smashing into a house, doesn't say who they are, and their guns are out, they're shooting, and they're in the wrong place. This has happened time and time again. The ATF has gone in and gotten the wrong guy in the wrong place. The law is that if somebody is shooting at you, using deadly force, the mere fact that they are a law enforcement officer, if they are in the wrong, does not mean you are obliged to allow yourself to be killed so your kinfolk can have a wrongful death action. You are legally entitled to defend yourself and I was speaking of exactly those kind of situations. If you're going to do that, you should know that they're wearing body armor so you should use a head shot. Now all I'm doing is stating the law, but all the nuances in there got left out when the story got repeated."

"Obviously, crime pays, or there'd be no crime."