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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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Joseph Sobran
Age: 64 †
Born: 1946
Born: February 23
Died: 2010
Died: September 30
Journalist
Writer
Ypsilanti
Michigan
Become
Anarchy
Doe
Idols
Stuck
Thus
Worship
Necessary
Maybe
Evil
Idol

More quotes by 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.
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Liberalism is really piecemeal socialism, and socialism always attacks three basic social institutions: religion, the family, and private property. Religion, because it offers a rival authority to the state the family, because it means a rival loyalty to the state and property, because it means material independence of the state.
Joseph Sobran
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The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.
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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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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
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Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.
Joseph Sobran
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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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Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
Joseph Sobran
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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.
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...[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.
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Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.
Joseph Sobran
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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.
Joseph Sobran
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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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Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.
Joseph Sobran
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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.
Joseph Sobran
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If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.
Joseph Sobran
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Nothing annoys a 'progressive' like refugees from Communism, who give the lie to the Great Socialist Dream.
Joseph Sobran
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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'.
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
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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