Chesterton spoke of 'the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.' It would be hard to sum up liberalism for succinctly.

There can be no such thing as "limited government," because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly of power.

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.

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.

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

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

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.