Wyatt Earp quotes

View Quote I won't be arrested today. You threw us, Johnny.

View Quote The fight has now commenced, go to fighting or get away!

View Quote Mind me now, Mannen, put up those guns and go on home.

View Quote I think you came here to make a fight with me, and if you did, you can have one here right now.

View Quote I am a friend of Doc Holliday, because when I was city marshal of Dodge City, Kansas, he came to my rescue and saved my life, when I was surrounded by desperados.

View Quote I was tired of being threatened by Ike Clanton and his gang. I believed from what they had said to others and to me, and from their movements, that they intended to assassinate me the first chance they had, and I thought if I had to fight for my life against them, I had better make them face me in an open fight.

View Quote You damned dirty cur thief, you have been threatening our lives, and I know it. I think I should be justified shooting you down any place I should meet you, but if you are anxious to make a fight, I will go anywhere on earth to make a fight with you, even over to the San Simon among your own crowd.

View Quote I did not intend to fight unless it became necessary in self defense, and in the performance of official duty. When Billy Clanton and Frank McLowry drew their pistolsl I knew it was a fight for life, and I drew and fired in defense of my own life and the lives of my brothers and Doc Holliday.

View Quote Doc [Holliday] was a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a gun that I ever knew.

View Quote We had no YMCA's. [To biographer Stuart Lake, when asked late in life why he'd spent so much time in saloons.]

View Quote Speed is fine, accuracy is final [On the advantage of careful aiming of a weapon over rate of fire]