Joseph Sobran Quotes

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

The Federal Government is exploiting public fear to redefine the relationship between the rulers and the American people.

Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

Civil liberty is the power of a civil society or state to govern itself by its own discretion or by laws of its own making, without being subject to the impositions of any power in appointing and directing which the collective body of the people have no concern and over which they have no control

Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.

What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the general government.

Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.

In the end, the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised - and it should be.

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins ... Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.

The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned - the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach - is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.

How do we preserve our civil rights, our traditions as a liberal democracy, in a time when government power is expanding and is more and more difficult to check?

There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts.

When the private sector fails, the solution is more government. When the government fails, the solution is more government.

As the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.

The basic function of the government everywhere in all times, whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organisation may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters: and it's principal, characteristic and indispensable instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the gaoler - to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest of schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke.

No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.

Go and try to start your own government in the United States today and you'll be squashed very quickly.

The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.