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Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.
Joseph Sobran
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Joseph Sobran
Age: 64 †
Born: 1946
Born: February 23
Died: 2010
Died: September 30
Journalist
Writer
Ypsilanti
Michigan
Coming
Asks
Freedom
Littles
Little
Right
Mean
Permission
More quotes by Joseph Sobran
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
Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.
Joseph Sobran
Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.
Joseph Sobran
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.
Joseph Sobran
Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.
Joseph Sobran
...[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
Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
Joseph Sobran
If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.
Joseph Sobran
Nothing annoys a 'progressive' like refugees from Communism, who give the lie to the Great Socialist Dream.
Joseph Sobran
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.
Joseph Sobran
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
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
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
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
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
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
The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.
Joseph Sobran
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
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
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