Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.

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.

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.

There has never been a humane communist regime. Marxism is inherently totalitarian. It recognizes no moral limits on the state. It's the most convenient ideology for aspiring tyrants; it also retains its appeal for intellectuals, who have proved equally skillful at rationalizing abuses of power and at exculpating themselves.

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.

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.

The welfare state is institutionalized crime -- 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.

Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.

Anything called a program is unconstitutional.

Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

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

The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.

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

The purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.

The Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was meant to inhibit only the federal government, not the states. The framers, as The Federalist Papers attest (see No. 28), saw the state militias as forces that might be summoned into action against the federal government itself, if it became tyrannical.

The words of Jesus, including those Jefferson and the Jesus Seminar have blue-pencilled, have a unique permanence. They don't merely survive as aphoristic wisdom; they have an authority in our hearts, even when we try to deny them. They command. We can obey or rebel. That is why Jesus is still not only loved but hated -- and why those who hate him feel they have to profess to love him.

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.

Because the state can no longer protect us from crime, it wants to take away from us the means of protecting ourselves. This is the logic of gun control.