Today’s Washington is about as attentive to the Tenth Amendment as the Unitarian Church is to the Book of Revelation.

A belief in moral absolutes should always make us more, not less, critical of both sides in any conflict. This doesn’t mean that both sides are equally wrong; it means that since we all fall short of moral perfection, even the side whose cause is truly righteous may commit terrible acts of violence in defense of that cause — and, worse, may feel quite justified in committing them. That is the difference between being righteous and being self-righteous. Moral standards are absolute; but human fidelity to them is always relative.

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.

All in all, the framers would probably agree that it’s better to impeach too often than too seldom. If presidents can’t be virtuous, they should at least be nervous.

By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence.

Controlling the interpretation of the Constitution is vital to the leftist agenda of expanding the federal government’s power. That means keeping the federal judiciary as liberal as possible and treating the U.S. Supreme Court’s liberal legacy as sacrosanct.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

How odd that Americans, and not just their presidents, have come to think of their Constitution as something separable from the government it’s supposed to constitute. In theory, it should be as binding on rulers as the laws of physics are on engineers who design bridges; in practice, its axioms have become mere options. Of course engineers don’t have to take oaths to respect the law of gravity; reality gives them no choice. Politics, as we see, makes all human laws optional for politicians.

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.

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

In a few more days we will celebrate Xmas, the day we commemorate the birth of you-know-who … It seems the modern consensus of enlightened people that his name should be used in polite society only when cursing … [P]oliticians are often eager to associate themselves personally with you-know-who, even — and especially — when they rather flagrantly ignore his injunctions … He was out of step then, and he is out of step now. He is eternally out of step, and eternally more powerful than those who keep in step. You know who I mean.

In the current political vocabulary, “need” means wanting to get someone else’s money. “Greed,” which used to mean what “need” now means, has come to mean wanting to keep your own. “Compassion” means the politician’s willingness to arrange the transfer.

It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that he was the lesser evil. And they weren’t too sure about that.

It’s a curious fact about Americans that in their most fiercely patriotic moods they are willing to set aside their Constitution, the guarantor of their freedom, in order to prosecute war — yet they insist that the war is for “freedom.”

It’s a real enigma why people are so averse to real free market capitalism even now. Here we are, in the century that has seen Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot — and we’re still being warned against the “robber barons” of the 19th century. I don’t know that Jay Gould or John D. Rockefeller ever killed anyone. The State has killed countless people, and yet we’re always supposed to remain on guard against these “greedy villains” of yesteryear.

It’s in politics that men are always aggravating the hopeless tangle of their laws, obscuring the simplest principles and making a mockery of liberty.

Legalizing abortion to get government out of the bedroom is like legalizing cannibalism to get government out of the kitchen.

Liberalism is really piecemeal socialism, and socialism always attacks three basic social institutions: religion, the family, and private property. Religion, because it offers a rival authority to the state; the family, because it means a rival loyalty to the state; and property, because it means material independence of the state.

Liberalism’s fatal flaw … is that it has no permanent norms, only a succession of enthusiasms espoused by minor prophets. Each of these seems like a hot new idea to liberals, but soon goes to irksome and destructive extremes.

Liberals have a new wish every time their latest wish is granted. Conservatives should make them spell out their principles and ideals. Instead of doing this, conservatives allow liberals to pursue incremental goals without revealing their ultimate destination. So, thanks to the negligence of their opponents, liberals control the terms of every debate by always demanding “more” while never defining “enough.” The predictable result is that they always get more, and it’s never enough.

Liberals see the Constitution itself as “living” and “evolving” that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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