Joseph Sobran Quotes

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.

Where there is a choice of two evils, most men take both.

When you have to choose between two evils, the choice is going to be evil.

I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.

Throughout history, one of the biggest problems is that the correct course of action is not always obvious, and the obvious course of action is not always correct.

It was better that a little blood should be shed that much blood should be saved. The blood that was shed was bad blood; the blood that was saved was good blood.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

Redemption is promised at the low price of surrender of your critical faculties.

The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest.

When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?

Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.

If you are picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking Evil.

How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

We never do evil so thoroughly and heartily as when led to it by an honest but perverted, because mistaken, conscience.

You become like what you worship

Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing.

The lesser evil is also evil.

The cause of all human evils is the not being able to apply general principles to special cases.

An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.

It is seldom that statesmen have the option of choosing between a good and an evil.

Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives.

If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

Even our pets can become idols.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?