Quotes from Joseph Sobran

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

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

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

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

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.

War is just one more big government program.

The chances of your being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of your being robbed by your own government? That's easy: 100 per cent.

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.

There can be no such thing as "limited government," because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly of power.

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

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.

The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.

The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honor you can bestow on him. It means that you recognize his superiority to yourself.

The US Constitution serves the same function as the British royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition and continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system of power.

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.

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

By a very conservative estimate, a hundred million people have died at the hands of their own governments in this century. Given that record, how bad could anarchy be?

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.

The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honor you can bestow on him. It means that you recognize his superiority to yourself.

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.

The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

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

Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.