“The great object is that every man be armed… Everyone who is able may have a gun.”
Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_12s27.html(14 June 1788). Debates and other Proceedings of the Convention of Virginia, taken in shorthand by David Robertson of Petersburg, at 271, 275 2d ed. Richmond (1805)
1780s
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Patrick Henry 43
attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the Un… 1736–1799Related quotes

“Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?”
Source: Character of the Happy Warrior http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww302.html (1806), Line 1.
On Sal Maglie's departure from Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, from A Day in the Bleachers https://books.google.com/books?id=iJqHg1sitk0C&pg=PA114 (1955) by Hano, p. 114
Other Topics

Window Dictatorship and Window Rights (1990) http://www1.kunsthauswien.com/english/fenster.htm

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech about the Orlando Shooting (June 13, 2016)

As quoted in "Ben Carson explains Holocaust comments" http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/08/politics/ben-carson-gun-control-2016-election/, CNN, (October 9, 2015)

1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)
Context: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?