Dennis Prager
79 quotes
Biography
"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?"
"A person whose conduct consists of not hurting anyone is not good; such a person is merely not bad. To be a good person involves the active pursuit of good. It is not enough merely to refrain from hurting other human beings; one must intercede on their behalf."
"Nor is it enough to refrain from personally performing an injustice, for in order to be good one must seek out and rectify injustices performed by others."
"Yes, there is a “secret to happiness”—and it is gratitude. All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that it is being unhappy that leads people to complain, but it is truer to say that it is complaining that leads to people becoming unhappy. Become grateful and you will become a much happier person."
"People who have chosen to regard themselves as victims cannot allow themselves to enjoy life, because enjoying life would challenge their perception of themselves as victims."
"You can allow any real—or merely perceived—flaw to diminish your happiness."
"Unhappy poor people at least have the fantasy that money will make them happy; unhappy rich people don’t even have that."
"If all of us realized that the people with whom we negatively compare our happiness are plagued by pains and demons of which we know little or nothing, we would stop comparing our happiness with others’."
"The only people who have no bad tendencies are dead."
"All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be happy. Become grateful and you will become a much happier person."
"Happiness is a moral obligation."
"Everything worthwhile in life is attained through hard work. Happiness is not an exception."
"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."
"The foolishness of that comment [equating meat-eating to the Holocaust] is so deep, I can only ascribe it to higher education. You have to have gone to college to say something that stupid."
"I am for no law to be passed to prevent Keith Ellison or anyone else from bringing any book he wants to his swearing-in, whether actual or ceremonial. But neither I nor tens of millions of other Americans will watch in silence as the Bible is replaced with another religious text for the first time since George Washington brought a Bible to his swearing-in"
"[I]f you look at Europe and see a continent adrift, with no identity and no strong values beyond economic equality and possessing little capacity to identify evil, let alone a will to fight it, then you need to start fighting."
"The Left doesn't hate evil, it hates those who hate evil. On the Left there is a subliminal, subconscious deep understanding that they are inadequate to the job of fighting evil. That's why they get so passionate about trivia."
"It is small surprise that among tyrannical regimes and their defenders, America and Israel are so often identified as the same enemy. This is not merely a consequence of America's standing along behind Israel; the United States has aided various Arab countries very generously, and it has on some critical occasions backed Arab regimes, such as Nasser's Egypt in 1956 and Saudi Arabia in 1981, against Israel. The hostility is aroused largely because America and Israel represent democracy, equal rights for women, a higher quality of life, and a willingness to confront despotism. That is why the two non-Muslim countries that have suffered the heaviest losses from Islamic suicide murderers are Israel and the United States."
"Israel remains an embattled democracy in the midst of authoritarian states, and the birthplace of the kibbutz to which tens of thousands of youth from around the world have turned for a living lesson in human equality."
"[A] child smacking an adult across the face is not funny. It is, in fact, one of the last things society should tolerate."
"Of all the world's evils, child abuse may rank as the greatest."
"Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the document that articulated the principle of human rights endowed by the Creator, thereby ultimately ensuring the end of slavery, and led to the establishment of the country that has served as the beacon of hope for people of every race and ethnicity."
"Conservatives view America as President Abraham Lincoln viewed it; as the 'Last Best Hope of Earth.'"
"[T]he further left one goes, the more negative the assessment of today's America and the America of the past."
"The United States of America fought a horrific civil war that ended slavery. Yes, slavery was the reason for the Civil War."