Robert H. Bork > Quotes

“Radical egalitarianism necessarily presses us towards collectivism because a powerful state is required to suppress the differences that freedom produces. That raises the sinister and seemingly paradoxical possibility that radical individualism is the handmaiden of collectivist tyranny.

This individualism, it is quite apparent in our time, attacks the authority of family, church, and private association. The family is said to be oppressive, the fount of our miseries. It is denied that the church may legitimately insist upon what it regards as moral behavior in its members. Private association are routinely denied the autonomy to define their membership for themselves.

The upshot is that these institutions, which stand between the state and the individual, are progressively weakened and their functions increasingly dictated or taken over by the state. The individual becomes less of a member of powerful private institutions and more a member of an unstructured mass that is vulnerable to the collectivist coercion of the state. Thus does radical individualism prepare the way for its opposite.”
― ROBERT H BORK, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“Liberalism moves, therefore, toward radical individualism and the corruption of standards that movement entails. “By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified … Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.”11”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“A nations moral life is, of course, the foundation of its culture.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“until recently our artists did better than the cave painters.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“Radical individualism, radical egalitarianism, omnipresent and omni-incompetent government, the politicization of the culture, and the battle for advantages through politics shatter a society into fragments of isolated individuals and angry groups.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“The enemy within is modern liberalism, a corrosive agent carrying a very different mood and agenda than that of classical or traditional liberalism. That the modern variety is intellectually bankrupt diminishes neither its vitality nor the danger it poses.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“A person whose main difficulty is not crop failure but video breakdown has less need of the consolations and promises of religion.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“Surely a number of such people want to do the right thing, are well-intentioned, but just as surely some do not act from creditable intentions. Some of our elites…professors, journalists, makers of motion pictures and television entertainment, et al.…delight in nihilism and destruction as much as do the random killers in our cities. Their weapons are just different.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“Krauthammer wrote, “it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant.”5 This situation is thoroughly perverse.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“The Declaration’s pronouncement of equality was sweeping but sufficiently ambiguous so that even slave holders, of whom Jefferson was one, subscribed to it. That ambiguity was dangerous because it invited the continual expansion of the concept and its requirements. The Declaration was not, clearly, a document that was understood at the time to promise equality of condition, not even among white male Americans. The”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“President Clinton at one point proposed raising taxes on the rich although it did not appear that it would increase the tax revenues received from them. A substantial proportion of the public said they favored higher taxes on high-income earners even if that did not increase the total taxes such people paid. The effect would not be to help anyone else but merely to pull down the better off.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“The defining characteristics of modern liberalism are radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification).”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“Burke, unlike the Mill of On Liberty, had a true understanding of the nature of men, and balanced liberty with restraint and order, which are, in truth, essential to the preservation of liberty.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“If only we could recover mere instruction in an era when SAT scores decline and the solution is not improved instruction but raising all scores so that students seem more accomplished than they actually are.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society carried forward what Roosevelt and Truman had begun and accomplished the most thorough-going redistribution of wealth and status in the name of equality that this country had ever experienced.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“The usual strategy for coping with the discomfort of knowing that others are superior in some way is to try to reduce the inequalities by bringing the more fortunate down or by preventing him from being more fortunate. This is the strategy of envy.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“This “filtering down” is not a mechanical process in which ideas of intellectuals just happen to come to the attention of the general public. It is instead a conscious effort on the part of intellectuals to alter Americans’ perceptions of the world and of themselves, an effort, among other things, to weaken or destroy Americans’ attachment to their country and to Western civilization.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“Nobody knew what that sort of blather meant in the Sixties and nobody knows now.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“A judge who announces a decision must be able to demonstrate that he began from recognized legal principles and reasoned in an intellectually coherent and politically neutral way to his result. Those who would politicize the law offer the public, and the judiciary, the temptation of results without regard to democratic legitimacy.”
― Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America

“The fact is that antihierarchical, egalitarian sentiments were on the rise in political movements, whose tendencies were, therefore, towards collectivism and centralization, with a concomitant decline in the freedoms of business organizations, private associations, families, and individuals. We”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“Their point is not that the Constitution does not authorize judicial power but rather that the Constitution does not limit that power, as of course it would if it were law. That was certainly the meaning of the Harvard professor who told me that my notion of the Constitution as law must rest upon an obscure philosophic principle with which he was not familiar. He said that in response to my argument from the idea of law that there were some results a constitutional court could not properly reach.”
― ROBERT H BORK

“Heresy,” Hilaire Belloc reminds us, “is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. We”
― Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America

“Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.”
― Robert H. Bork

“In law, the moment of temptation is the moment of choice, when a judge realizes that in the case before him his strongly held view of justice, his political and moral imperative, is not embodied in a statute or in any provision of the Constitution. He must then choose between his version of justice and abiding by the American form of government. Yet the desire to do justice, whose nature seems to him obvious, is compelling, while the concept of constitutional process is abstract, rather arid, and the abstinence it counsels unsatisfying. To give in to temptation, this one time, solves an urgent human problem, and a faint crack appears in the American foundation. A judge has begun to rule where a legislator should.”
― Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America

“Radical egalitarianism necessarily presses us towards collectivism because a powerful state is required to suppress the differences that freedom produces.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“The fact that resistance to modern liberalism is weakening suggests that we are on the road to cultural disaster because, in their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism.”
― Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

“The American design of a constitutional Republic is such a “complete and self-supporting scheme.” The heresy that dislocates it is the introduction of the denial that judges are bound by law.”
― Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America