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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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Joseph Sobran
Age: 64 †
Born: 1946
Born: February 23
Died: 2010
Died: September 30
Journalist
Writer
Ypsilanti
Michigan
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Hot
Minors
Enthusiasms
Enthusiasm
Norm
Irksome
Permanent
Liberals
Norms
Soon
Flaws
Flaw
Goes
Liberalism
Prophets
Idea
Prophet
Succession
Seems
Destructive
Minor
Ideas
Extremes
Fatal
Espoused

More quotes by 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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Loyalty to your country should never require you to lie about it.
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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The Constitution poses no threat to our current 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.
Joseph Sobran
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Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.
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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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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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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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
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Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.
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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Not surprisingly, the federal judiciary nearly always rules in favor of the federal government. Judicial review, contrary to the assurances of its advocates, has hardly restrained Congress at all. Instead it has progressively stripped the states of their traditional powers, while allowing federal power to grow unchecked.
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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The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.
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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Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
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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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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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