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Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
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Radio broadcast (1936), as quoted in The New Language of Politics: An Anecdotal Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans, and Political Usage (1968) by William L. Safire, p. 178
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Variants: Guns will make us strong, butter will only make us fat. We have no butter... but I ask you, would you rather have butter or guns? Preparedness makes us powerful. Butter merely makes us fat.

 

Hermann Goring

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She's ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted determined men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world. They are not doing this solely for the sake of self-defence. A huge, largely land-locked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers. No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet politburo don't have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a super power in only one sense—the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms.

 

Margaret Thatcher

 

Let's make it clear for the dimmest bulbs among you: the kids at Columbine High didn't die from too many guns, they died from too few. I'm not suggesting that the teachers should have carried guns — not as franchised agents of the state. They should have carried guns as ordinary individuals, exercising a sacred right, and in performance of a solemn duty to protect the young lives that were placed — very foolishly, as it turned out — in their hands.

 

L. Neil Smith

 

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.

 

Alan Keyes

 

I had killed over twenty before the German major said he would make them give up. I covered him with my automatic and told him if he didn't make them stop firing I would take off his head next. And he knew I meant it. He told me if I didn't kill him, and if I stopped shooting the others in the trench, he would make them surrender.
He blew a little whistle and they came down and began to gather around and throw down their guns and belts. All but one of them came off the hill with their hands up, and just before that one got to me he threw a little hand grenade which burst in the air in front of me.
I had to touch him off. The rest surrendered without any more trouble. There were nearly 100 of them.

 

Alvin C. York

 

Let me make a short, opening, blanket comment. There are no "good guns". There are no "bad guns". Any gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the hands of a decent person is no threat to anybody — except bad people.

 

Charlton Heston