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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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Joseph Sobran
Age: 64 †
Born: 1946
Born: February 23
Died: 2010
Died: September 30
Journalist
Writer
Ypsilanti
Michigan
Think
Else
Surprise
Thinking
Doe
Expect
Government
Wealth
Anything
Honest
Work
Takes
Always
Force
Would
War
Corruption
Men
Makes
Organized

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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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The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.
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Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
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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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If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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When liberals clamor for 'diversity,' they don't necessarily mean they are ready to tolerate actual disagreement.
Joseph Sobran
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Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.
Joseph Sobran
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The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.
Joseph Sobran
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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
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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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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.
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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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