01c. 1948 ADSigmund 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 / quote ↗
02c. 1948 ADAny moral system that is detached from God, no matter how noble and sincerely held, will likewise fail.Dennis Prager / quote ↗
03c. 1948 ADWe 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 failDennis Prager / quote ↗
04c. 1948 ADWithout God, right and wrong are just personal beliefs. Personal opinions. I think shoplifting is okay, you don’t.Dennis Prager / quote ↗
05c. 1948 ADUnless there is a God, all morality is just opinion and belief. And virtually every atheist philosopher has acknowledged this.Dennis Prager / quote ↗
06c. 1948 ADThose 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1948 ADAccording to just about every poll on happiness, people on the Left are generally less happy than conservatives.Dennis Prager / quote ↗
08c. 1948 ADI 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 / quote ↗
09c. 1948 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1948 ADAnother 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 / quote ↗
12c. 1948 ADYou judge people in the context of their time, not in the context of ours.Dennis Prager / quote ↗
13c. 1948 ADThere 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1948 ADChildren are God’s or nature’s practical joke on couples—that which is produced by passion then proceeds to nearly kill it.Dennis Prager / quote ↗
15c. 1948 ADA 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 / quote ↗
16c. 1948 ADTo 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1948 ADTalk 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 / quote ↗
18c. 1948 ADOnly 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 / quote ↗
19c. 1948 ADA 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 / quote ↗
20c. 1948 ADI often wonder if I am entitled to be as happy as I am, given the amount of suffering in the world.Dennis Prager / quote ↗
21c. 1948 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
22c. 1948 ADThis 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 / quote ↗
23c. 1948 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
24c. 1948 ADThere 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 / quote ↗