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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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Joseph Sobran
Age: 64 †
Born: 1946
Born: February 23
Died: 2010
Died: September 30
Journalist
Writer
Ypsilanti
Michigan
Liberty
Obscuring
Politics
Tangle
Law
Aggravating
Making
Mockery
Always
Simplest
Men
Hopeless
Laws
Principles
More quotes by Joseph Sobran
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
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
Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.
Joseph Sobran
Since outright slavery has been discredited, democracy is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.
Joseph Sobran
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
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
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
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
...[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
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
If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.
Joseph Sobran
Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.
Joseph Sobran
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
Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.
Joseph Sobran
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
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
Thus does a 'necessary evil' become an idol. Maybe we're stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?
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
In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.
Joseph Sobran
Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.
Joseph Sobran