Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
- Mark Twain, quoted by Rudyard Kipling in "From Sea to Shining Sea"

Irreverence is the champion of liberty. -- Mark Twain, 1888.

Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak.                --George Orwell, 1945

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act [of 1878] to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.                --Mohandas Gandhi

A rifle this hand will never fire.
                         --Mohandas Gandhi, given a rifle during his service in the Ambulance Corps in WWI.

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it. --A. Lincoln, 6 Apr 1859

Once you learn to read you will be forever free. --Fredrick Douglass