Dennis Prager Quotes

The Ten Commandments are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society. But such a society cannot be created or maintained if it is not based on truth.

Freedom comes from moral self-control. There is no other way to achieve it.

Compromise, while at times morally necessary or at least justifiable, is more often only the first permission for a person (or society) to begin a long downhill descent.

Since the 1970s, I have asked students if they would first try to save their drowning dog or a drowning stranger. And for 40 years I have received the same results: One third vote for their dog, one third for the stranger, and one third don't know what they would do.

If you ask what's best for the country, vote Republican. If you ask how will you get more money from the government, vote Democrat

The last thing Jews need is to create tension with their best friends. And the last thing Christians need is a renewal of Christian hatred toward Jesus' people.

Africans who immigrate to America know how little racism exists there. They suspect it before emigrating from Africa, and they know it after arriving in America. Indeed, America, the Left's depiction of it notwithstanding, is the least racist country in the world.

Virtually nothing Barack Obama has done has left America or the world better since he became president. Nearly everything he has touched has been made worse.

Universities are seminaries to produce Leftists

The greatest hope most Americans - including Republicans - had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country's president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations.

This is the belief of the Left: You negotiate with evil, and get tough with your allies

If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

Only a fool can believe people are basically good

Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent.

In colleges throughout America, students are taught to have disdain for the white race. I know this sounds incredible, or at least exaggerated. It is neither.

World opinion" - that vapid, amoral concept - deems the murder of members of one's group less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in Congo elicits virtually no attention from "world opinion." Between 1998 and 2008, according to the International Rescue Committee, 5.4 million people in Congo were killed, and virtually no one in the world knows this. But if a few Iraqi prisoners are sexually humiliated in an American-run prison, or if one Palestinian dies at the hands of an Israeli soldier, the story is on the front pages of the world's newspapers.

There's more time spent on teaching kids about recycling than on character development in the American schools.

An Islamist is a Muslim who seeks to impose Shariah on others, including many 'cultural' or secular Muslims.

Morally judging cultures (except Christian, Israeli and American cultures) is forbidden by the left. Indeed not judging non-Western cultures is the very definition of 'multiculturalism'.

The biggest battle in life is with yourself

Governments grow as God declines, in both Europe and the United States

America, not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on,

The words 'I'm sorry' are so powerful that it's almost difficult to overstate

Socialism values equality more than liberty.

People who know the difference between right and wrong do the wrong thing all the time. You know why? Because they can.

The Left, which dominates the media, the arts, and most of intellectual life in the West, has rendered criticism of Christianity and Zionism acceptable, even laudable, but criticism of Islam unacceptable. Why has the Left done this? Because the enemy (radical Islam) of my enemy (America and Israel) is my friend, and because the Muslim world is regarded as the underdog vis-à-vis powerful America and Israel, and the Left supports what it perceives as the underdog.

There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.

The entire European Union is a left-wing dream

The Arab world has no peer when it comes to hatred - of the Western world generally, and especially of Israel. Israel-hatred and its twin, Jew-hatred, are the oxygen that the Arab world breathes.

A decent person does not alienate children from a parent, no matter how angry they are at the parent for the divorce. It's unfair to the children, and it's unfair to the other human being

Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.

The problem for the Left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the Right as vile, it has to argue the issues.

If you want to know what you look like, look into a mirror. If you want to know how you think, you should write

I would bet that the average teenager in this country has not used the word 'wisdom' in the past year

You owe others a happy disposition

Since neither black animosity nor the Left's falsehood of "racial tensions" is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America can do will affect the perceptions of many black Americans or of the leftist libel.

Many intellectuals in the Western world defended the half-century (1959–2008) dictatorship of Fidel Castro of Cuba by noting, for example, under Castro's rule the literacy rate in Cuba rose to a hundred percent. However, Cubans were not allowed to read anything forbidden by the communist regime. In the view of Castro's defenders, it is better to be unfree and literate than to be free and illiterate. The Torah's view, however, would seem to be the opposite; it is better to be free and illiterate, just as it is better to eat a poor man's food and be free than to eat a rich man's food as a slave.
Furthermore, the very concept of freedom carries with it the possibility of improvement of one's circumstances. The illiterate are free to learn to read; the poor are free to work, retain the fruits of their labors, and improve their lot in life - perhaps even become wealthy, as so many have in the freedom of the Western, Bible-based world.

The Left would like to believe that racism - not the breakdown of marriage and family, the absence of religious norms, a degraded popular culture, and other issues that all concern values - is the primary impediment to black progress in America. Therefore the Left declares racism the greatest impediment to black progress.

It is almost impossible to do good without wisdom. All the good intentions in the world are likely to be worthless without wisdom. Many of the horrors of the twentieth century were supported by people with good intentions who lacked wisdom.

The rarest of the good qualities in human beings is courage

The Left is doing to America what it has done to almost everything it has deeply influenced - the arts, the university, religion, culture, minorities, Europe: ruining it.

It is easier to take a position in the abstract than when it hits home.

Kidnapping people and selling them into slavery, as was done to Africans and others throughout history, is forbidden by the Eighth Commandment. Critics of the Bible who argue the Bible allowed such slavery, and defenders of such slavery who used the Bible, were both wrong. And lest there be any confusion about this issue, the very next chapter of the Torah specifies a person who kidnaps another - particularly when done with the intention of selling the victim into slavery - 'shall be put to death' (Exodus 21:16).

We live in a world filled with evil and moral confusion. There is only one way out: affirmation of a God Whose primary demand of us is that we treat our fellow human beings decently. Faith in any god who makes any other primary demand will ultimately fail to solve the problem of evil. And any moral system that is detached from God, no matter how noble and sincerely held, will likewise fail.

Tell me of a right wing-induced hysteria of the last 50 years

Hillary Clinton wanted to hide what she was doing so that there was no trail

Most American elementary schools and high schools, and nearly all colleges and universities, teach everything that is significant from a liberal/Left perspective.

Almost every major news medium on earth is either center-left or left. And the left around the world loathes America.

For the Left, politics is the way to transform the world; for conservatives, politics is primarily the way to stop the Left from doing so. The former is much more fulfilling than the latter.

Leftism seeks to undo most of the values that are distinct to Judeo-Christian religion.

Because gratitude is the key to happiness, anything that undermines gratitude must undermine happiness. And nothing undermines gratitude as much as expectations. There is an inverse relationship between expectations and gratitude: The more expectations you have, the less gratitude you will have.

The Missing Tile syndrome is ubiquitous. If you are overweight, all you see are flat stomachs and perfect physical specimens. If you have pimples, all you see is flawless skin. Women who have difficulty getting pregnant walk around seeing only pregnant women and babies. Nor do you need to be overweight, have pimples, be balding, or want a child to believe that you have a missing tile. You can allow any real - or merely perceived - flaw to diminish your happiness.

There is nothing - not any religious or secular body of work - that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.

Happiness is dependent on self-discipline. We are the biggest obstacles to our own happiness. It is much easier to do battle with society and with others than to fight our own nature.

No day passes without a Democratic politician, a left-wing commentator, or, if I may be excused a redundancy, a left-wing academic labeling Republicans and conservatives racist.

I am bored generally means "I am boring".

If you equate happiness with success, you will never achieve the amount of success necessary to make you happy.

Parents are flawed human beings who are given a role that more approximates that of God than of mere mortals.

To receive children's love and to come home to a child who runs to you with a hug, among the
most powerful emotional experiences available.

Just because you cannot fight every evil does not mean you should fight no evils.

Those who believe in nothing are very, very jealous and angry at those who believe in something.

An unhappy life is a life not lived.

Fear of God is a liberating emotion, freeing one from a disabling fear of evil, powerful people. This needs to be emphasized because many people see fear of God as onerous rather than liberating.

Those of you who love the Lord should hate evil

The human being is here to redeem the world.

I believe that free money is as addictive as cocaine

Those indoctrinated by leftist thinking become largely incapable of making accurate moral judgments.

I do think that the badmouthing and alienating of a child from a parent is one of the few unforgivable sins. I do think those people will have to answer to God who will say, You allowed your anger to destroy the relationship of your child to the other parent? Isn't that why I gave you a conscience?

Leftism and narcissism are almost synonymous

In various European countries, it is increasingly common for young men to live with their parents into their 30s and even longer. Why not? In the welfare state, there is no shame in doing so.

Complaining is never powerful because at the root of a complaint is powerlessness

The Left is totalitarian in its nature

It was not the creation of 760,000 Arab-Palestinian refugees that has created this hatred. It was this hatred that created the refugees. Had six Arab armies not attacked Israel to destroy it in 1948, there would not have been any refugees.

America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life. As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization. And eventually it will not be America. It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.

Lies and victimhood make evil possible

The bigger the government, the greater the corruption

Only people can relate to JHWH, the animals, the stars they are with Elohim. We are with JHWH and Elohim. We are also with that God who creates the world., not just the personal God. Adonai (i.e., JHWH) is the God of the characteristic of mercy and compassion, and Elohim is the God whose characteristic is justice. And you need BOTH for the world to function.

But if there is a just God, there is ultimate justice.

The fact is that not only do people get more wise and more conservative as they get older, they get more kind and more generous, too.

For some reason, the evolutionists have not come up with an evolution-based explanation for why human beings react so powerfully to music. But surely they will.

When women criticize men it's called feminism. When men criticize women it's called misogyny

I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not.

Our society is obsessed with personal rights, but it will survive only if we adopt personal obligations.

Most people wait until tragedy strikes before thinking about how to incorporate tragedy into their life.

The more that you expect, the less happy you will be
because if the expectations are realized you won't be grateful

Liberals don't ask 'Does it work?' They ask 'Does it equalize?'

When emotions dominate, maturity and wisdom deteriorate

The idea that you earn things - that you earn respect, that you earn income, responsibility, the vote, punishment ... these ideas are anathema to the liberal mind.

It is scary to live in the Obama era with its use of government to suppress dissent

All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it's truer to say that complaining leads to people becoming unhappy.

The notion that there is no basic value system is far more incoherent or invalid than the notion that there are essential values. Every religion can tell you it has basic values. You ask a Christian, most Christians would say love God and love your neighbor. Is that the entirety of Christianity? No one in his right mind would say it is.

The Left is not interested in prosperity, it is interested in equality

Years ago, a Muslim woman called my radio show and asked me why I was not a Muslim. She asked this question with complete sincerity, and I answered her with equal sincerity.
The name of her religion, I told her, is Islam, which in Arabic means submission (to God). The name of the Jewish people is Israel, which in Hebrew means struggle with God. I'd rather struggle with God, I said, than only submit to God.
She thanked me and hung up. The answer apparently satisfied her.
Arguing/struggling with God is not only Jewishly permitted, it is central to the Torah and later Judaism. In this regard, as in others, the Torah is unique. In no other foundational religious text of which I am aware is arguing with God a religious expectation. The very first Jew, Abraham, argues with God, as does the greatest Jew, Moses. (It is worth noting that though Muslims consider Abraham their father as well, arguing with God has no place in the Quran or in normative Islam.)
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this Jewish concept. For one thing, it enabled Jews to believe in the importance of reason - God Himself could be challenged on the basis of reason and morality; one does not have to suspend reason to be a believing Jew. Indeed, it assured Jews that belief in God was itself the apotheosis of reason. For another, it had profound psychological benefits to Jews. We do not have to squelch our questioning of, or even our anger at, God. One can be both religious and real

Religious Americans donate more and volunteer more time to charitable institutions than do secular Americans.

By definition, the moment one crosses from center to left, one accepts more government control of people's lives. Therefore, the further left society moves, the more there is government control over its citizens' lives. It is astonishing that this obvious fact is not universally acknowledged and that the Left has somehow successfully portrayed itself as preoccupied with personal liberty.

The vast majority of those who are famous are not significant and the vast majority of those who are significant are not famous.

The Left has always been anti-religious, and especially anti-Christian.

Identity without democracy is totalitarian; democracy without identity is weak and self-betraying.

If you inflict your unhappiness onto others, it is sinful

In theory, multiculturalism is something we should all celebrate; unfortunately, in practice, multiculturalism means multi-morality ... The only antidote to such nihilistic thinking is ethical monotheism, the belief in one universal code of ethics. Differing cultures glorify humanity, but differing moralities destroy it. We must teach what Professor Viktor Frankl concluded after surviving Auschwitz: There are only two races of human beings, the decent and the indecent. That is how the world is divided: not between rich and poor, men and women, North and South, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, or any other nonmoral division that too many contemporary liberals have been advocating.