From my cold dead hands!

Charlton Heston’s closing remarks at the 2000 NRA annual meeting in Charlotte North Carolina.

“Every time our country stands in the path of danger, an instinct seems to summon her finest first — those who truly understand her.

When freedom shivers in the cold shadow of true peril, it’s always the patriots who first hear the call.

When loss of liberty is looming, as it is now, the siren sounds first in the hearts of freedom’s vanguard. The smoke in the air of our Concord bridges and Pearl Harbors is always smelled first by the farmers, who come from their simple homes to find the fire, and fight, because they know that sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blued steel — something that gives the most common man the most uncommon of freedoms.

When ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument, that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty. That’s why those five words issue an irresistible call to us all, and we muster. So — so, as, ah, we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words for everyone within the sound of my voice to hear and to heed — and especially for you, Mister Gore:”

“From my cold dead hands!”

Charlton Heston (born John Charles Carter; October 4, 1923 — April 5, 2008) was an American actor of film, theater and television. Heston is known for having played heroic roles, such as Moses in The Ten Commandments, Colonel George Taylor in Planet of the Apes and Judah Ben-Hur in Ben-Hur, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was one of a handful of Hollywood actors to speak openly against racism and was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Initially a liberal Democrat, he later supported conservative politics and was president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003.

Heston campaigned for Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Reportedly when an Oklahoma movie theater premiering his movie El Cid was segregated, he joined a picket line outside in 1961. Heston makes no reference to this in his autobiography, but describes traveling to Oklahoma City to picket segregated restaurants, much to the chagrin of Allied Artists, the producers of El Cid. During the civil rights march held in Washington, D.C. in 1963, he accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. In later speeches, Heston said he helped the civil rights cause, “long before Hollywood found it fashionable.