Joseph Sobran Quotes

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

War is just one more big government program.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The hypocrite recognizes the honest man as his deadly enemy.

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

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.

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

The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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