Joseph Sobran Liberty Quotations

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.

War is just one more big government program.

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

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".

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.

We have been living amidst one of the great revolutions of human history, and we hardly know it: the penetration of the State into every aspect of human life and society. Some people regard this as good and "progressive," others regard it as tyrannical; but either way, it's a fact, a transformation as great as, say, the Industrial Revolution. Absolutely nothing is now beyond the scope of State power.

Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.