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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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Joseph Sobran
Age: 64 †
Born: 1946
Born: February 23
Died: 2010
Died: September 30
Journalist
Writer
Ypsilanti
Michigan
Freedom
Insist
Fact
Patriotic
War
Aside
Facts
Curious
Order
Mood
Guarantor
Constitution
Prosecute
Americans
Fiercely
Willing
Moods

More quotes by 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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...[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
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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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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
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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.
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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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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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.
Joseph Sobran
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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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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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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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If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.
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.
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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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
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Loyalty to your country should never require you to lie about it.
Joseph Sobran
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Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.
Joseph Sobran
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The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.
Joseph Sobran
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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