Best 87 quotes of Joseph Sobran on MyQuotes

A belief in moral absolutes should always make us more, not less, critical of both sides in any conflict. This doesn't mean that both sides are equally wrong; it means that since we all fall short of moral perfection, even the side whose cause is truly righteous may commit terrible acts of violence in defense of that cause -- and, worse, may feel quite justified in committing them. That is the difference between being righteous and being self-righteous. Moral standards are absolute; but human fidelity to them is always relative.

A Christian can believe that God 'ordained' the 'powers that be' - including political rulers and slaveholders - for purposes too deep for us to understand fully, and that while they last we must provisionally accept them; but that they were not meant to last forever.

A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll destroy you.

All in all, the framers would probably agree that it's better to impeach too often than too seldom. If presidents can't be virtuous, they should at least be nervous.

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.

An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.

Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.

At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.

Because the state can no longer protect us from crime, it wants to take away from us the means of protecting ourselves. This is the logic of gun control.

By today's standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today's U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence.

Can the real Constitution be restored? Probably not. Too many Americans depend on government money under programs the Constitution doesn't authorize, and money talks with an eloquence Shakespeare could only envy. Ignorant people don't understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them.

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.

Controlling the interpretation of the Constitution is vital to the leftist agenda of expanding the federal government's power. That means keeping the federal judiciary as liberal as possible and treating the U.S. Supreme Court's liberal legacy as sacrosanct.

De-Christianizing America has been high on the progressive agenda, and, thanks to the government (especially the federal courts), it has been a great success. Nor can we overlook the contribution of the entertainment industry, which now determines what passes for 'culture.' The main practical vehicle of de-Christianization has been the Sexual Revolution. A few radicals have called for the abolition of the family, but most liberals have been more discreet, avoiding hostile rhetoric while quietly but constantly pursuing policies that result in lower birthrates and fatherless children.

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.

Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities.

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.

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.

Government is the agent of those who are too refined to do their own mugging.

How odd that Americans, and not just their presidents, have come to think of their Constitution as something separable from the government it's supposed to constitute. In theory, it should be as binding on rulers as the laws of physics are on engineers who design bridges; in practice, its axioms have become mere options. Of course engineers don't have to take oaths to respect the law of gravity; reality gives them no choice. Politics, as we see, makes all human laws optional for politicians.

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.

If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.

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.

If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.

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.

In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.

In a few more days we will celebrate Xmas, the day we commemorate the birth of you-know-who. ...It seems the modern consensus of enlightened people that his name should be used in polite society only when cursing.... [P]oliticians are often eager to associate themselves personally with you-know-who, even -- and especially -- when they rather flagrantly ignore his injunctions.... He was out of step then, and he is out of step now. He is eternally out of step, and eternally more powerful than those who keep in step. You know who I mean.

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.

It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.

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'.

It's a real enigma why people are so averse to real free market capitalism even now. Here we are, in the century that has seen Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot-and we're still being warned against the 'robber barons' of the 19th century. I don't know that Jay Gould or John D. Rockefeller ever killed anyone. The State has killed countless people, and yet we're always supposed to remain on guard against these 'greedy villains' of yesteryear.

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.

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.

Legalizing abortion to get government out of the bedroom is like legalizing cannibalism to get government out of the kitchen.

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.

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.

Liberals have a new wish every time their latest wish is granted. Conservatives should make them spell out their principles and ideals. Instead of doing this, conservatives allow liberals to pursue incremental goals without revealing their ultimate destination. So, thanks to the negligence of their opponents, liberals control the terms of every debate by always demanding 'more' while never defining 'enough.' The predictable result is that they always get more, and it's never enough.

Liberals see the Constitution itself as 'living' and 'evolving' that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.

Loyalty to your country should never require you to lie about it.

Man is the only creature disposed to kill huge numbers of members of his own species, and his instrument is usually the state.

Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.

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.

Nothing annoys a 'progressive' like refugees from Communism, who give the lie to the Great Socialist Dream.

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.

Now whatever you think of the liberal agenda on its merits, until very recently nobody thought the Constitution meant what liberals now say it means.

People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us.

Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.

Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.

Power tempts even the best of men to take liberties with the truth.

Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.