Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Joseph Sobran

Image
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.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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
Image
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.
Joseph Sobran
Image
...[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.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.
Joseph Sobran
Image
When liberals clamor for 'diversity,' they don't necessarily mean they are ready to tolerate actual disagreement.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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
Image
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.
Joseph Sobran
Image
Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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.
Joseph Sobran
Image
Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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.
Joseph Sobran
Image
Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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