Joseph Sobran
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Fashion
Freedom has ceased to be a birthright; it has come to mean whatever we are still permitted to do.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Sacrifice
Legalizing abortion to get government out of the bedroom is like legalizing cannibalism to get government out of the kitchen.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Xmas
If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.Collection: Politics
The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.Collection: People
Too many voters are already bought -- not by corporate campaign donors, but by the government itself.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Ideas
Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.Collection: Intelligent
Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.Collection: People
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.Collection: Mean
...[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.Collection: Government
The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.Collection: Government
Government is the agent of those who are too refined to do their own mugging.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Tyrants
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.Collection: President
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.Collection: Hands
The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.Collection: People
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Comforting
Man is the only creature disposed to kill huge numbers of members of his own species, and his instrument is usually the state.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Christian
If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.Collection: War
Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.Collection: Liberty
The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.Collection: Argument
The Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was meant to inhibit only the federal government, not the states. The framers, as The Federalist Papers attest (see No. 28), saw the state militias as forces that might be summoned into action against the federal government itself, if it became tyrannical.Collection: Rights
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.Collection: Jobs
Nothing annoys a 'progressive' like refugees from Communism, who give the lie to the Great Socialist Dream.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Blessing
Power tempts even the best of men to take liberties with the truth.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Media
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Religious
We would be much worse without Christianity; but we wouldn't know it.Collection: Would Be