Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.
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.
Since outright slavery has been discredited, “democracy” is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.
In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.
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.
Too many voters are already bought – not by corporate campaign donors, but by the government itself.
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.
If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.
Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.
Loyalty to your country should never require you to lie about it.
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.
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?
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.
Liberals see the Constitution itself as ‘living’ and ‘evolving’ that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.
I realize that the New York Times probably not written for the express purpose of driving me mad; I think of it as liberalism’s daily bulletin board.
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.
Altering the Constitution has become the daily business of the Federal Government which the document is supposed to guide and limit. Both Congress and the judiciary assume, and exercise, countless powers they aren’t entitled to.
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.
Man is the only creature disposed to kill huge numbers of members of his own species, and his instrument is usually the state.