William Powell Quotes

I would warn against holsters with devices for quick-draw. Devices always fail when you need them most.

It is easy to pick up a weapon and in a short while become a reasonably good shot. This makes it extremely easy for the virtually untrained individual to come to believe that he is an expert in ballistics. False confidence is as great a fault as no confidence at all. In the training of any freedom fighters there must be a merger of fearlessness and intelligent caution. A dead man has no use for confidence or courage.

There is only one purpose in hand-to-hand combat, and that is to kill. Never face an enemy with the idea of knocking him out. The chances are extremely good that he will kill you.

Unity is the only way in which the people of this country can overthrow the fascists, communists, capitalists, and all the other assholes who claim running a representative government is so difficult. The emphasis has been taken from the Bill of Rights and placed on the type of interpretation of the Constitution that best suits the people in power.

I have no patience with individuals who claim that everything will be beautiful if guns and other weapons are outlawed. These people do not have the foresight to realise that, if weapons are made illegal, they will only be possessed by enemies of the people (i.e., the army, the police, outlaws, and madmen). I feel very strongly that every person should be armed and that he or she should be prepared for the worst. There is no justice left in the system. The only real justice is that which the individual creates for himself, and the individual is helpless without a gun. This may sound like the dogma expounded by radical right-wing groups, like the Minute Men. It is.

Never before have self-suffiency and education been so important, and they are virtually inseparable from survival.

Since shotguns are not military weapons, your local sporting goods dealer will have good information about them, as long as you aren't black, Spanish, or a white freak.

It seems acceptable today to scream for revolution, without any concept of what will follow it. This is just what the forces at large want, for who will follow a man who doesn't know where he's going?

A government creates its own revolution. There can be no revolt without it.

A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. … I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction.

I detest symbolic protest, as it is an outcry of weak, middle-of-the-road, liberal eunuchs. If an individual feels strongly enough about something to do something about it, then he shouldn't prostitute himself by doing something symbolic. He should get out and do something real.

Treat any and all drugs with respect, for most of the time they are stronger than you are.

Believe it or not, bananas do contain a small quantity of Musa Sapientum bananadine, which is a mild, short-lasting psychedelic.

If I could come out in this book and advocate complete revolution and the violent overthrow of the United States of America, without being thrown in jail, I would not have written The Anarchist Cookbook, and there would be no need for it.

Anarchy can no longer be defined as freedom from oppression or lack of government control. It has gone further than that. It has become, especially in the young people today, a state of mind, an essence of being. It can be expressed as "doing their own thing", or maybe just having the freedom to do or not to do.