Dennis Prager

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.

Most people who call themselves conservatives can't explain the American value system.

Once enough Americans reacquaint themselves with Americanism, we should promote it to all countries just as the Left promotes leftism and Muslims promote Islam. One need not be American to affirm Americanism.

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.

The universities deceive when they say they have no agenda other than to open minds.

Liberals tend to put the onus of your success on society and conservatives on you and your family.

With the demise of the biblical religions that have provided the American people with their core values since their country's inception, we are reverting to the pagan worldview. Trees and animals are venerated, while man is simply one more animal in the ecosystem - and largely a hindrance, not an asset.

America will nurture a new Muslim - one who can believe in Muhammad and the Quran but who abandons belief in a Shariah-based state and affirms the primary American value of individual liberty, which has not been a normative Islamic value.

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.

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.

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 could do will affect either many blacks' perceptions or the leftist libel.

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

The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults.

In little more than a generation, feminism has obliterated roles. If you wonder why so many men choose not to get married, the answer lies in large part in the contemporary devaluation of the husband and of the father - of men as men, in other words.

Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society, but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.

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.

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

People confuse goodness with weakness. It is weak people, not good people (goodness demands strength), who are taken advantage of.

If there is no God, the labels 'good' and 'evil' are merely opinions. They are substitutes for 'I like it' and 'I don't like it.' They are not objective realities.

There have been huge Muslim demonstrations against cartoons depicting Muhammad and any other perceived insult against Islam. But I am unaware of a single demonstration of Muslims against Muslim terror directed at non-Muslims.

That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner.

Most women are not programmed to prefer a great career to a great man and a family. They feel they were sold a bill of goods at college and by the media.

Conservatives divide the world in terms of good and evil while liberals do it in terms of the rich and poor.

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.

Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza, with no individual liberty, and no freedom of speech or press.

Proponents of same-sex marriage regularly label opponents 'radical' and 'extremist.' However, given that no society in thousands of years has allowed same-sex marriage, it is, by definition, the proponents of same-sex marriage whose position is radical and extreme.

When watching 'The Passion,' Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films. For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange the killing and torture of the Christians' Savior.

Secularism breeds narcissism. There is nothing higher to live for, so you live for you.

Those who are compassionate when they should be tough will be tough when they should be compassionate.

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

The biggest obstacle to people becoming better is that you have to really want to be a good person in order to be a better person, and most people would rather be other things.

Therefore the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.

Two of the many areas of conflict between Judeo-Christian values and leftism concern the separation between the holy and the profane and the separation between humans and animals.

The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism.

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.

It is easy to respect secular Americans who hold fast to the Constitution and to American values generally. And any one of us who believes in God can understand why some people, given all the unjust suffering in the world, just cannot believe that there is a Providential Being.

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.

One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if its very complex its very profound.

Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.

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.

Finding patterns is the essence of wisdom.

Repetition is the mother of pedagogy.

When Jews left Judaism, they didn't stop being religious. They simply swapped God-based Judaism for godless secular humanism and leftism. For left-wing Jews, Judaism is their ethnicity; leftism is their religion.

We have a moral obligation to act happy even if we don't feel it.

Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

I am convinced that great ideas that are powerfully presented can change a mind in five minutes.

The whole American experiment has been predicated on giving individuals as much control over their own lives as possible.

Every person who speaks or writes for the public will make an occasional faux pas, and sooner or later will write or say something inappropriate.

The essence of the Hebrew Bible, transmitted by Christianity, is separation: between life and death, nature and God, good and evil, man and woman, and the holy and the profane.

The election, and even the re-election, of a black man as president, in a country that is 87 percent non-black - a first in human history - has had no impact on what are called 'racial tensions.'

The larger the state, the more callous it becomes... the colder its heart. It is also true that the bigger the corporation, the more callous its heart. But unlike the state, corporations have competition and have no police powers.

Leftists' meanness toward those with whom they differ has no echo on the normative right.

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

Most young people have tremendous respect for older people's views.

There is little correlation between the circumstances of people's lives and how happy they are.

If your religion doesn't teach you the difference between good and evil, your religion is worse than useless.

Want to raise children who will be happy adults? Teach them not to whine.

Obviously, the issue for the Left isn't aging white males; it is conservatives, whether they are young or old, white or nonwhite, male or female. If female aborigines were conservative, the Left would have a problem with female aborigines.

Every Left-wing hysteria of my lifetime has turned out to be untrue. Every single one.

Complaining not only ruins everybody else's day, it ruins the complainer's day, too. The more we complain, the more unhappy we get.

The Left has always sought single, non-values-based explanations for human behavior.

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.

It is essential that Christians understand this: Every Jew - secular, religious, assimilated, left-wing, right-wing - fears being killed because he is Jewish. This is the best-kept secret about Jews, who are widely perceived as inordinately secure and powerful. But it is the only universally held sentiment among Jews.

Corruption is Africa's greatest problem. Not poverty. Not lack of riches. Not racism.

A bad mood is like bad breath. Both are wrong to inflict onto others.

The only difference between your local college and a Christian seminary is that the latter is more honest.

Given the amount of unjust suffering and unhappiness in the world, I am deeply grateful for, sometimes even perplexed by, how much misery I have been spared.

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

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

Given the unprecedented ignorance of the Bible in contemporary America, it is likely that more young Americans will only know the Noah of 'Noah.' We can only hope that the film offers even a fraction of the wisdom of the original.

To understand the Left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The Left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil as humanity has generally understood the term.

Society may no longer define marriage in the only way marriage has ever been defined in the annals of recorded history. Many societies allowed polygamy, many allowed child marriages, some allowed marriage within families; but none, in thousands of years, defined marriage as the union of people of the same sex.

Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

There's a lot more power in calm than in vituperation.

Having travelled to some 20 African countries, I find myself, like so many other visitors to Africa before me, intoxicated with the continent. And I am not referring to the animals, as much as I have been enthralled by them during safaris in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Rather, I am referring to the African peoples.

There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the Left, which had been morally confused about Communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

All of creation, in the biblical view, was to ultimately prepare the way for the creation of man. But one does not need the Bible alone to hold this view. A purely scientific reading of the universe is in keeping with this view. Everything - every natural and physical law - is exquisitely tuned to produce life, and ultimately man, on earth.

Whatever feminists may say about their only advocating choices, everyone knows the truth: Feminism regards work outside the home as more elevating, honorable, and personally productive than full-time mothering and making a home.

Climate change is the mother of all hysterias of the Left.

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.

The world is a bad place. There are many wonderful people, but on the whole, humanity basically stinks.

Much of the world's moral compass is broken. The moral north reads south and the moral south reads north.

Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example?

The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The western world is threatened by secular fanaticism.

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 beings who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not 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.

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?

Complaining not only ruins everybody elses day it ruins the complainers day too. The more we complain the more unhappy we get.

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.

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

Virtually every agnostic lives like an atheist, living completely irreligious lives

Even non-democratic allies no longer trust America. Barack Obama has alienated our most important and longest standing Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both the anti-Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-Iran Arab states have lost respect for him.

How a society channels male aggression is one of the greatest questions as to whether that society will survive. That's why I am not against violence in the media, I am against the glorification of immoral violence.

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.

To posit the existence of a Creator requires only reason. To posit the existence of a good God requires faith.

For the Left, affluence is won, not earned.

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.

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

Once one understands that 'racial tensions' is a euphemism for a black animosity toward whites and a left-wing construct, one begins to understand why the election of a black president has had no impact on most blacks or on the left.

No American conservative has ever argued that the government should never be involved in peoples' lives. That is anarchy, and we don't argue for that.