Quote

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

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
Modern
Morbid
Hard
Abnormal
Always
Spokes
Would
Spoke
Liberalism
Sacrifice
Succinctly
Habit
Chesterton
Normal
Sacrificing

More quotes by 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
Image
Since outright slavery has been discredited, democracy is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.
Joseph Sobran
Image
Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
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
Loyalty to your country should never require you to lie about it.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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
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 Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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
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
Liberals see the Constitution itself as 'living' and 'evolving' that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.
Joseph Sobran
Image
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
Image
Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.
Joseph Sobran
Image
Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.
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