Dennis Prager Quotes

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychiatry and an atheist, theorized that one’s attitude toward one’s father largely shaped one’s attitude toward God.

~ Dennis Prager

Any moral system that is detached from God, no matter how noble and sincerely held, will likewise fail.

~ Dennis Prager

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

~ Dennis Prager

Without God, right and wrong are just personal beliefs. Personal opinions. I think shoplifting is okay, you don’t.

~ Dennis Prager

Unless there is a God, all morality is just opinion and belief. And virtually every atheist philosopher has acknowledged this.

~ Dennis Prager

Those who value wisdom know that when you give people something for nothing, you produce ungrateful people; that when you obscure the differences between men and women, you end up with many aimless men and angry women; that when you give children “self-esteem” without their earning it, you produce narcissists who enter adulthood often incapable of empathy and of handling life; that if you do not destroy evil, it will proliferate; and that if you are kind to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the kind. If you really want goodness to prevail, wisdom is a key to unlocking it. The heart is not.

~ Dennis Prager

According to just about every poll on happiness, people on the Left are generally less happy than conservatives.

~ Dennis Prager

I have devoted much of my life to studying, writing, and lecturing about the subject of happiness. In particular, I have advocated that people act as happy as possible even when they do not feel happy. This is, I believe, both a moral obligation to all those who are in our lives—it is unfair to others to inflict our bad moods on them—and a particularly effective way to increase our own happiness, since acting happy elevates one’s mood. This is hardly controversial—in just about every area of life, human beings deeply influence how they feel by how they act. As a rule, those who object to this idea of acting contrary to how one feels are people on the Left—because on the Left, feelings are sacrosanct.

~ Dennis Prager

The oft-cited charge that belief in God and religion has led to more wars and evil than anything else is as untrue as it is widely believed. Secular movements in the twentieth century alone killed and enslaved more people than any other movement in any century in history.

~ Dennis Prager

The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.

~ Dennis Prager

Another example was relentlessly expressed during Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, and especially since her defeat: the assertion that she was the victim of misogynistic comments and that she lost because she was a woman. None of it is true. But it keeps feminists thinking of women as victims — and people who think of themselves as victims are rendered weak....Modern feminists are afraid of life. They are afraid of differences of opinion, and especially afraid of men.....Feminists are outraged and unduly stressed by much of life itself.

~ Dennis Prager

You judge people in the context of their time, not in the context of ours.

~ Dennis Prager

There is a morally flawed understanding of ‘peace.’ In much of the world (again, thanks to the left), peace has been so narrowly defined as to be morally irrelevant. It essentially means not having troops fighting in a foreign country. Thus, because the United States has troops fighting in Afghanistan and recently had troops fighting in Iraq, it is considered a ‘threat to peace.’ But Iran, with no troops on foreign soil, is not considered a threat to peace, even though it sustains terror movements, murders its own people, seeks to annihilate Israel, props up the mass murdering Syrian regime and is rapidly developing a nuclear weapon.

~ Dennis Prager

Children are God’s or nature’s practical joke on couples—that which is produced by passion then proceeds to nearly kill it.

~ Dennis Prager

Unhappy poor people at least have the fantasy that money will make them happy, unhappy rich people don’t even have that.

~ Dennis Prager

A simple test to ascertain how much you enjoy and derive meaning from your work is to ask yourself whether you would continue doing it if you won the lottery.

~ Dennis Prager

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.

~ Dennis Prager

Talk about a group that is REALLY suffering, it's women in America. To be a woman in America is just to live under this sword of wage inequality. Ask her in 20 years from now, Patricia Arquette, you had the chance to talk to millions of people in over 100 countries. What did you decide to talk about? With women being traded as sex slaves in the tens of thousands under Islamic rule, in Africa and the middle East, and WHAT did you decide to talk about? Wage inequality in America. You're a moral fool.If in fact women really got 77 cents to the dollar, why would any employer hire men? If I can get the exact same work and save almost 25%, you would have to be an idiot to hire a man! It's all nonsense. It's all a lie.

~ Dennis Prager

Only marriage combines all three forms of companionship - spouse is family, best friend, and permanent companion. This is why it is widely held that while the death of a child is the most painful loss, the death of a spouse is the most disorienting one.

~ Dennis Prager

A good general rule is that self-esteem for its own sake turns out to be much worse than merely reinforcing unearned positive feelings about oneself. Not only does high self-esteem (especially when unearned) not increase “social responsibility”; it decreases it. The criminologist and sociologist Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University who has spent a lifetime studying violent criminals, notes that the great majority of criminals have higher self-esteem than noncriminals. You need high self-esteem to think that rules apply to others but not to you.

~ Dennis Prager

I often wonder if I am entitled to be as happy as I am, given the amount of suffering in the world.

~ Dennis Prager

The poor who commit murder, rape and robbery are not only not starving, they have far more material things than the word ‘poverty’ suggests.

~ Dennis Prager

This secular Leftist denial of human free will is one of the reasons the Left recoils from labeling evil as evil, and (correctly) ascribes talk about good and evil to the religious.

~ Dennis Prager

The bigger the government, the more the corruption. It's almost never mentioned, and it might be the biggest of the ten principles that I am speaking of…Do you know who has created the greatest evils of history? Big governments. Big SECULAR governments. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, all big States. Why would anybody trust the big state? It's amazing how many callers have imbued the college message that more people have been killed by religion than anything else in history. NO. More people have been killed by governments than anything else in history…….and just in the 20th century alone, and none of them were religious. You don't learn THAT in college.

~ Dennis Prager

There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old. This fact must lead all reasonable human beings, that is, all human being who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not basically good.

~ Dennis Prager

The only people who have no bad tendencies are dead.

~ Dennis Prager

Another problem with the view that you don’t need God to believe that murder is wrong is that a lot of people haven’t shared your view. And you don’t have to go back very far in history to prove this. In the twentieth century millions of people in Communist societies and under Nazism killed about one hundred million people—and that doesn’t count a single soldier killed in war. So, don’t get too confident about people’s ability to figure out right from wrong without a Higher Authority.

~ Dennis Prager

A good general rule is that one should seek to be loved by one’s peers—one’s spouse and one’s friends are the best examples—but beyond that, one should first seek to be respected. Seeking to be loved is almost always destructive to non-peer relationships. Teachers, for example, should seek to be respected by their students, not loved. Likewise parents, when raising their children, should not seek to be loved; they need to do too much that may not elicit love in order to raise good and, ironically, loving children. In the liberal world in America, the roles of parents and teachers shifted from authority figures to peers. The results have not been good for children or for society. When one seeks to be loved by those over whom one must exercise authority, one compromises the values necessary to do a proper job.

~ Dennis Prager

It is America (or Israel) at war, not just any war, that disturbs the Left. That is why there have been few demonstrations, and none of any size, against the mass murder of Sudan’s blacks; the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Congo; China’s crushing of Tibet; or Saddam Hussein’s wars against Iran, Kuwait, and Iraq’s own Kurds. Though there are always admirable individual exceptions, the Left has not been nearly as vocal about these large scale atrocities as it is about America’s wars. One additional reason is that, in general, atrocities committed by non-whites rarely interest the Left—and therefore ‘world opinion,’ which is essentially the same thing as Leftist opinion.

~ Dennis Prager

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.

~ Dennis Prager

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.

~ Dennis Prager

If your parents bring you no shame, be very grateful. If you're proud of them, celebrate.

~ Dennis Prager

No matter how old you are, as long as a parent is alive, you are still a child. It is only after both die that you cease being a child. And then, all of a sudden, not only are you no longer a child, you are also next in line.

~ Dennis Prager

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

~ Dennis Prager

People can become addicted to fame, money, and attention as deeply as they become addicted to drugs.

~ Dennis Prager

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.

~ Dennis Prager

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

~ Dennis Prager

Everything worthwhile in life is attained through hard work. Happiness is not an exception.

~ Dennis Prager

It is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s Left that hates America. However, because the Left dominates the world’s news media and because nearly everyone, understandably, relies on the news media for their understanding of what happens in the world, many people, including Americans, believe that ‘the world’ hates America. And, of course, the Left-dominated media help to create much of the hatred for America that does exist. If I relied exclusively on the New York Times or Le Monde or the Guardian or CNN International or virtually any of the world’s major television and radio news stations and newspapers for all I knew about America, I would probably hold it in contempt as well.

~ Dennis Prager

Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused, why is Communist so much less a term of revulsion than Nazi? When people describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, why do they use the terms Nazi or fascist but almost never Communist? And, unlike Hitler, Communist mass murderers are rarely used as examples of evil incarnate. Sometimes, in fact, they are used in a heroic or even entertaining way. There are “Mao” restaurants in various cities in the Western world. It is unlikely that there are any “Hitler” restaurants in the West. So, too, while Che Guevara T-shirts and posters are ubiquitous, there is nothing similar celebrating a Nazi, or fascist, or perhaps any non-Communist killer.

~ Dennis Prager