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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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Joseph Sobran
Age: 64 †
Born: 1946
Born: February 23
Died: 2010
Died: September 30
Journalist
Writer
Ypsilanti
Michigan
Mean
Authority
Independence
Really
State
Basic
Piecemeal
Always
Religion
Material
Rival
Family
Institutions
Rivals
Means
Private
Attacks
Social
Property
Liberalism
Three
Offers
Socialism
States
Materials
Loyalty

More quotes by 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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If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.
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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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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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
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Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
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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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.
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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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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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
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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.
Joseph Sobran
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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.
Joseph Sobran
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Since outright slavery has been discredited, democracy is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.
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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Loyalty to your country should never require you to lie about it.
Joseph Sobran
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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.
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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Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.
Joseph Sobran