“I did not intend to fight unless it became necessary in self defense...” – Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp ... Movie Quotes Database

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.

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Wyatt Earp 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. Wyatt Earp We had no YMCA's. [To biographer Stuart Lake, when asked late in life why he'd spent so much time in saloons.] Wyatt Earp Speed is fine, accuracy is final [On the advantage of careful aiming of a weapon over rate of fire]