Top 50 Joseph Sobran Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

3. “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

4. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

6. “The purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.”

— Joseph Sobran

7. “Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.”

— Joseph Sobran

8. “The hypocrite recognizes the honest man as his deadly enemy.”

— Joseph Sobran

9. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

10. “Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they’re individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.”

— Joseph Sobran

11. “Politicians never accuse you of ‘greed’ for wanting other people’s money – only for wanting to keep your own money.”

— Joseph Sobran

Featured in: Quotes About Greed

12. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

13. “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

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

— Joseph Sobran

15. “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...”

— Joseph Sobran

16. “War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.”

— Joseph Sobran

17. “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

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

— Joseph Sobran

19. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

22. “Freedom has ceased to be a birthright; it has come to mean whatever we are still permitted to do.”

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

24. “The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that a pickpocket doesn’t always get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself.”

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

26. “When liberals clamor for ‘diversity,’ they don’t necessarily mean they are ready to tolerate actual disagreement.”

— Joseph Sobran

27. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

28. “Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like.”

— Joseph Sobran

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

31. “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

32. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

33. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

34. “The measure of the state’s success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.”

— Joseph Sobran

35. “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

36. “Nothing annoys a ‘progressive’ like refugees from Communism, who give the lie to the Great Socialist Dream.”

— Joseph Sobran

37. “War is just one more big government program.”

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

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

— Joseph Sobran

42. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

43. “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

44. “Thus does a ‘necessary evil’ become an idol. Maybe we’re stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?”

— Joseph Sobran

45. “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

46. “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

47. “Anything called a “program” is unconstitutional.”

— Joseph Sobran

48. “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

49. “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.”

— Joseph Sobran

50. “Too many voters are already bought – not by corporate campaign donors, but by the government itself.”

— Joseph Sobran