Dennis Prager

"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."

"The insufficiency of defining goodness as not hurting others is clearly demonstrated by the general assessment of the behavior of most Germans under the Nazis. According to this definition, most Germans during the Holocaust were good people, since they did not hurt anyone. Yet most of us do not consider such Germans good people, clearly indicating that we recognize the impossibility of defining a good person as one who does not hurt anyone. You do not have to do something bad in order to do bad; you only have to do nothing."

"The moment you meet a person of another religion whom you consider to be as good, as intelligent, and as religious as you are, you will never be the same."

"I'm pro-choice, but I believe that most abortions are immoral. I take the nuanced middle ground."

""I'm a passionate moderate"."

"If you drop desires, you'll never have a Salk vaccine."

"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."

"American values, or Americanism, refers to what I call the "American Trinity": "Liberty," "In God We Trust," and "E Pluribus Unum" ("Out of Many, One"), the three values that appear on all American coins."

"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."

"The ideas that America should be a 'melting pot' or that all Americans should identify as American are now unutterable in educated company. Indeed, many college campuses do not have an American flag on their campus because some students regard it as 'offensive' — representing imperialism and capitalism."

"I will not end on a happy note, because there isn't one. But neither do I despair. One doesn't fight only when one is optimistic. One fights because it is the right thing to do and because America remains, as Lincoln said, 'the last best hope of earth.'"

"The majority of Republicans are not conservative."

"Most Americans no longer know what America stands for. For them, America has become just another country, a place located between Canada and Mexico. But America was founded to be an idea, not another country."

"Truth is a liberal value, and it is a conservative value, but it is not a leftist value."

"Anti-Zionism is not criticism of Israel. It is a hatred of Israel — a hatred greater than that of any other country and a delegitimization of Zionism, the movement to reestablish the Jewish national home. Imagine someone who argued that the establishment of the Italian state — Italy — was illegitimate and who hated Italy more than any other country in the world yet claimed that he was in no way anti-Italian, as he had Italian friends and loved Italian culture. No one would believe such an absurdity."

"Women are used by feminists; blacks are used by Democrats; workers are used by Communists."

"Affluence + secularism = cowardice. Affluence + boredom = Leftism."