Joseph Sobran quotes
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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 -
War is just one more big government program.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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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 -
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 -
Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.
-- Joseph Sobran -
Can the real Constitution be restored? Probably not. Too many Americans depend on government money under programs the Constitution doesn't authorize, and money talks with an eloquence Shakespeare could only envy. Ignorant people don't understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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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 -
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 -
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 -
The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.
-- Joseph Sobran -
It's a real enigma why people are so averse to real free market capitalism even now. Here we are, in the century that has seen Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot-and we're still being warned against the 'robber barons' of the 19th century. I don't know that Jay Gould or John D. Rockefeller ever killed anyone. The State has killed countless people, and yet we're always supposed to remain on guard against these 'greedy villains' of yesteryear.
-- Joseph Sobran -
The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
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An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.
-- Joseph Sobran -
Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
-- Joseph Sobran -
By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence..
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
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The prevailing notion is that the state should be neutral as to religion, and furthermore, that the best way to be neutral about it is to avoid all mention of it. By this sort of logic, nudism is the best compromise among different styles of dress. The secularist version of 'pluralism' amounts to theological nudism.
-- Joseph Sobran -
The words of Jesus, including those Jefferson and the Jesus Seminar have blue-pencilled, have a unique permanence. They don't merely survive as aphoristic wisdom; they have an authority in our hearts, even when we try to deny them. They command. We can obey or rebel. That is why Jesus is still not only loved but hated - and why those who hate him feel they have to profess to love him.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
Tax time approaches, and Americans are as always paying H & R Block billions to help them save some of their wealth from their ravenous government. Pitiful, in a way: it underlines the grim but unacknowledged fact that the government is their enemy and they have to hire protection from it. But don't we enjoy 'self-government'? Well, if we have it, I'd hardly say we enjoy it. True, we aren't being taxed by the monarch of Great Britain, but our American-born rulers claim far more of our wealth than the British monarchs ever did.
-- Joseph Sobran -
How odd that Americans, and not just their presidents, have come to think of their Constitution as something separable from the government it's supposed to constitute. In theory, it should be as binding on rulers as the laws of physics are on engineers who design bridges; in practice, its axioms have become mere options. Of course engineers don't have to take oaths to respect the law of gravity; reality gives them no choice. Politics, as we see, makes all human laws optional for politicians.
-- Joseph Sobran -
Some people don't mind a little constitutional sophistry in a good cause; and for liberals, centralizing all power in the federal government is always a good cause. Since most Americans don't know or care what the Constitution says, let alone what their ancestors thought it meant, the great liberal snow job has been very successful.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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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 -
...[T]oday's Washington is about as attentive to the Tenth Amendment as the Unitarian Church is to the Book of Revelation.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.
-- Joseph Sobran -
Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.
-- Joseph Sobran -
The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.
-- Joseph Sobran -
A belief in moral absolutes should always make us more, not less, critical of both sides in any conflict. This doesn't mean that both sides are equally wrong; it means that since we all fall short of moral perfection, even the side whose cause is truly righteous may commit terrible acts of violence in defense of that cause -- and, worse, may feel quite justified in committing them. That is the difference between being righteous and being self-righteous. Moral standards are absolute; but human fidelity to them is always relative.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
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 -
Thus does a 'necessary evil' become an idol. Maybe we're stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?
-- Joseph Sobran -
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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We have been living amidst one of the great revolutions of human history, and we hardly know it: the penetration of the State into every aspect of human life and society. Some people regard this as good and "progressive," others regard it as tyrannical; but either way, it's a fact, a transformation as great as, say, the Industrial Revolution. Absolutely nothing is now beyond the scope of State power.
-- Joseph Sobran -
Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.
-- Joseph Sobran -
What a blessing 'terrorism' is for the state! It's the ideal distraction from the day-to-day reality of the state's chief activity: wringing from its subjects the wealth they produce. Last September (2001) a handful of fanatics, armed only with box-cutters, provided a new rationale for the trillion -dollar swindle. A bonanza! I don't know what these 'terrorists' thought they were achieving: Making the infidel respect Allah? If so, they were wrong. You might as well try to make the U.S. government respect the U.S. Constitution.
-- Joseph Sobran -
Loyalty to your country should never require you to lie about it.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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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 -
People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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There has never been a humane communist regime. Marxism is inherently totalitarian. It recognizes no moral limits on the state. It’s the most convenient ideology for aspiring tyrants; it also retains its appeal for intellectuals, who have proved equally skillful at rationalizing abuses of power and at exculpating themselves.
-- Joseph Sobran -
...[T]he Constitution conferred only a few specific powers on the federal government, all others being denied to it (as the Tenth Amendment would make plain). Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population today - subtle logicians like you - can grasp such nuances. Too bad. The Constitution wasn't meant to be a brain-twister.
-- Joseph Sobran -
It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that he was the lesser evil. And they weren't too sure about that.
-- Joseph Sobran -
We would be much worse without Christianity; but we wouldn't know it.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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Government is the agent of those who are too refined to do their own mugging.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
De-Christianizing America has been high on the progressive agenda, and, thanks to the government (especially the federal courts), it has been a great success. Nor can we overlook the contribution of the entertainment industry, which now determines what passes for 'culture.' The main practical vehicle of de-Christianization has been the Sexual Revolution. A few radicals have called for the abolition of the family, but most liberals have been more discreet, avoiding hostile rhetoric while quietly but constantly pursuing policies that result in lower birthrates and fatherless children.
-- Joseph Sobran -
In a few more days we will celebrate Xmas, the day we commemorate the birth of you-know-who. ...It seems the modern consensus of enlightened people that his name should be used in polite society only when cursing.... [P]oliticians are often eager to associate themselves personally with you-know-who, even -- and especially -- when they rather flagrantly ignore his injunctions.... He was out of step then, and he is out of step now. He is eternally out of step, and eternally more powerful than those who keep in step. You know who I mean.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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Power tempts even the best of men to take liberties with the truth.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
The most successful revolutions aren't those that are celebrated with parades and banners, drums and trumpets, cannons and fireworks. The really successful revolutions are those that occur quietly, unnoticed, uncommemorated. We don't celebrate the day the United States Constitution was destroyed; it didn't happen on a specific date, and most Americans still don't realize it happened at all. We don't say the Constitution has ceased to exist; we merely say that it's a 'living document.' But it amounts to the same thing.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
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Liberals have a new wish every time their latest wish is granted. Conservatives should make them spell out their principles and ideals. Instead of doing this, conservatives allow liberals to pursue incremental goals without revealing their ultimate destination. So, thanks to the negligence of their opponents, liberals control the terms of every debate by always demanding 'more' while never defining 'enough.' The predictable result is that they always get more, and it's never enough.
-- Joseph Sobran -
Nothing annoys a 'progressive' like refugees from Communism, who give the lie to the Great Socialist Dream.
-- Joseph Sobran -
When liberals clamor for 'diversity,' they don't necessarily mean they are ready to tolerate actual disagreement.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
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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 -
Not surprisingly, the federal judiciary nearly always rules in favor of the federal government. Judicial review, contrary to the assurances of its advocates, has hardly restrained Congress at all. Instead it has progressively stripped the states of their traditional powers, while allowing federal power to grow unchecked.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.
-- Joseph Sobran -
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 -
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
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