Joseph Sobran Quotes

#1. Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like.

Joseph Sobran

#2. Now whatever you think of the liberal agenda on its merits, until very recently nobody thought the Constitution meant what liberals now say it means.

Joseph Sobran

#3. War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.

Joseph Sobran

#4. The US Constitution serves the same function as the British royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition and continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system of power.

Joseph Sobran

#5. The chances of your being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of your being robbed by your own government? That's easy: 100 per cent.

Joseph Sobran

#6. The hypocrite recognizes the honest man as his deadly enemy.

Joseph Sobran

#7. If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.

Joseph Sobran

#8. There can be no such thing as "limited government," because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly of power ...

Joseph Sobran

#9. I realize that the New York Times probably not written for the express purpose of driving me mad; I think of it as liberalism's daily bulletin board.

Joseph Sobran

#10. Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.

Joseph Sobran

#11. Freedom has ceased to be a birthright; it has come to mean whatever we are still permitted to do.

Joseph Sobran

#12. Thus does a 'necessary evil' become an idol. Maybe we're stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?

Joseph Sobran

#13. It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.

Joseph Sobran

#14. The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that a pickpocket doesn't always get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself.

Joseph Sobran

#15. We would be much worse without Christianity; but we wouldn't know it.

Joseph Sobran

#16. Even if we are all doomed to live under the state, it doesn't follow that there is, or even can be, such a thing as a good state.

Joseph Sobran

#17. Government has ceased to mean upholding and reinforcing the traditional rights and morals of the governed; it now means compulsion in the service of social engineering.

Joseph Sobran

#18. An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.

Joseph Sobran

#19. The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom".

Joseph Sobran

#20. Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.

Joseph Sobran

#21. Too many voters are already bought
not by corporate campaign donors, but by the government itself.

Joseph Sobran

#22. The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.

Joseph Sobran

#23. Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.

Joseph Sobran

#24. Altering the Constitution has become the daily business of the Federal Government which the document is supposed to guide and limit. Both Congress and the judiciary assume, and exercise, countless powers they aren't entitled to.

Joseph Sobran

#25. If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.

Joseph Sobran

#26. It's I politics that men are always aggravating the hopeless tangle of their laws, obscuring the simplest principles and making a mockery of liberty.

Joseph Sobran

#27. Chesterton spoke of 'the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.' It would be hard to sum up liberalism for succinctly.

Joseph Sobran

#28. Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.

Joseph Sobran

#29. If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.

Joseph Sobran

#30. Liberalism's fatal flaw, ... is that it has no permanent norms, only a succession of enthusiasms espoused by minor prophets. Each of these seems like a hot new idea to liberals, but soon goes to irksome and destructive extremes.

Joseph Sobran

#31. Because the state can no longer protect us from crime, it wants to take away from us the means of protecting ourselves. This is the logic of gun control.

Joseph Sobran

#32. Government is the agent of those who are too refined to do their own mugging.

Joseph Sobran

#33. The purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.

Joseph Sobran

#34. Power tempts even the best of men to take liberties with the truth.

Joseph Sobran

#35. Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.

Joseph Sobran

#36. The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honor you can bestow on him. It means that you recognize his superiority to yourself.

Joseph Sobran

#37. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll destroy you.

Joseph Sobran

#38. The liberal understanding of 'the separation of church and state' means that as the area of politics expands, the area of private freedom - religious and otherwise - shrinks.

Joseph Sobran

#39. It's a curious fact about Americans that in their most fiercely patriotic moods they are willing to set aside their Constitution, the guarantor of their freedom, in order to prosecute war
yet they insist that the war is for 'freedom'.

Joseph Sobran

#40. [T]oday's Washington is about as attentive to the Tenth Amendment as the Unitarian Church is to the Book of Revelation.

Joseph Sobran

#41. Liberals see the Constitution itself as 'living' and 'evolving' that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.

Joseph Sobran

#42. The real triumph of the state occurs when its subjects refer to it as "we," like football fans talking about the home team.

Joseph Sobran

#43. If one person in America had starved over the last 20 years, you, reader, would know his name. The media would see to that. It would be the most thoroughly documented death since John Kennedy's.

Joseph Sobran

#44. Tyranny seldom announces itself ... In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical.

Joseph Sobran

#45. Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right.

Joseph Sobran

#46. In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.

Joseph Sobran

#47. All in all, the framers would probably agree that it's better to impeach too often than too seldom. If presidents can't be virtuous, they should at least be nervous.

Joseph Sobran

#48. Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.

Joseph Sobran

#49. The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

Joseph Sobran

#50. War is just one more big government program.

Joseph Sobran

#51. Controlling the interpretation of the Constitution is vital to the leftist agenda of expanding the federal government's power. That means keeping the federal judiciary as liberal as possible and treating the U.S. Supreme Court's liberal legacy as sacrosanct.

Joseph Sobran

#52. A Christian can believe that God 'ordained' the 'powers that be' - including political rulers and slaveholders - for purposes too deep for us to understand fully, and that while they last we must provisionally accept them; but that they were not meant to last forever.

Joseph Sobran

#53. Man is the only creature disposed to kill huge numbers of members of his own species, and his instrument is usually the state.

Joseph Sobran

#54. The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.

Joseph Sobran

#55. At the end of a century that has seen
the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies,
the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.

Joseph Sobran

#56. Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.

Joseph Sobran

#57. Nothing annoys a 'progressive' like refugees from Communism, who give the lie to the Great Socialist Dream.

Joseph Sobran

#58. Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.

Joseph Sobran

#59. Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.

Joseph Sobran

#60. Voters who live off taxpayers are the Democrats' ace in the hole. The Democrats created big programs and never let the recipients forget it. This gives them an initial advantage of tens of millions of votes in any presidential election.

Joseph Sobran

#61. I call the present system 'Post-Constitutional America.' As I sometimes put it, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.

Joseph Sobran

#62. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities.

Joseph Sobran

#63. The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

Joseph Sobran

#64. Loyalty to your country should never require you to lie about it.

Joseph Sobran

#65. Why does corruption in government always surprise us? Why do we expect anything else from it? Government is organized force. It takes our wealth and makes war. And we think honest men would do that work?

Joseph Sobran

#66. Legalizing abortion to get government out of the bedroom is like legalizing cannibalism to get government out of the kitchen.

Joseph Sobran

#67. When liberals clamor for 'diversity,' they don't necessarily mean they are ready to tolerate actual disagreement.

Joseph Sobran

#68. Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.

Joseph Sobran