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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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Joseph Sobran
Age: 64 †
Born: 1946
Born: February 23
Died: 2010
Died: September 30
Journalist
Writer
Ypsilanti
Michigan
Best
Slaves
Believe
Libertarian
Way
Gain
Submissive
Make
Gains
Wonderfully
People
Slave
Assure
Democracy
Libertarianism
Liberty
Proved
Power
Ruling

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If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.
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The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.
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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.
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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.
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The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honor you can bestow on him. It means that you recognize his superiority to yourself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.
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Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.
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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.
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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.
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In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.
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The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.
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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.
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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
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Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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