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.
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.
Government is the agent of those who are too refined to do their own mugging.
We would be much worse without Christianity; but we wouldn’t know it.
Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they’re individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.
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.
The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.
Anything called a “program” is unconstitutional.
The hypocrite recognizes the honest man as his deadly enemy.
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.
If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.
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.
Now whatever you think of the liberal agenda on its merits, until very recently nobody thought the Constitution meant what liberals now say it means.
The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.
Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.
Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.
Thus does a ‘necessary evil’ become an idol. Maybe we’re stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?
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.
When liberals clamor for ‘diversity,’ they don’t necessarily mean they are ready to tolerate actual disagreement.
Nothing annoys a ‘progressive’ like refugees from Communism, who give the lie to the Great Socialist Dream.
Power tempts even the best of men to take liberties with the truth.