Quotes from Dennis Prager

Most people, like the Israelites, complain far more often than they express gratitude. People frequently register a complaint with a manufacturer or service provider, but they rarely write a note of thanks for a job well done. We would all do well to consider writing a thank you note each time we write a letter of complaint. Similarly, and more importantly, too many people criticize their spouses more often than they compliment them. That is the road to an unhappy marriage.

The left regards murderers, rapists, thieves and other violent criminals more as victims than as contemptible. Violent criminals do what they do because of poverty, racism and inequality, progressives argue.

The Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1810) taught, 'If you are not going to be better tomorrow than you were today, then what need do you have for tomorrow?' To which Telushkin has added: 'And if no one feels comfortable criticizing you, the likelihood that you will be better tomorrow is most probably nonexistent.

Belief in God means more than believing God exists; it also means believing God cares about us. After all, if God exists but doesn't care about us, what difference does it make to us whether God exists? For all intents and purposes, there is no difference between atheism and the existence of a God who doesn't care about us.

Or to put it another way, fun is during, happiness is during and after.

Human beings want to be happy, and they have a right to want to be. Far from being a selfish or ignoble goal, this is one of the distinguishing features of human beings. To the extent that animals can be said to want anything, what they want is to avoid pain and to be sated, but not to be happy.

in his magisterial Modern Times, the secular West wrongly applied Einstein's theories of relativity to morality: Not only were time and motion relative, so were good and evil.

In all my studies of happiness, one of the most significant conclusions I have drawn is that there is little correlation between the circumstances of people's lives and how happy they are. A moment's reflection should make this obvious to anyone. We know people who have a relatively easy life and who are essentially unhappy, and we know people who have suffered a great deal but maintained a relatively high level of happiness.

Sodom resembled twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, where state employees were stationed in apartment buildings to monitor everyone who entered the building, a level of oppression those fortunate to live in free societies have difficulty fathoming.

As Abba Eban, Israel's Foreign Minister from 1966 to 1974, expressed it: "Israel is the only nation whose citizens live on the same land, speak the same language and practice the same religion as their ancestors did 3,000 years ago.

when people think or write about happiness, self-control is rarely stressed. … Yet happiness is impossible without self-control. In fact, everything we want is impossible without self-control. Ask anyone who has achieved what you particularly desire to achieve, and you will find a profoundly self-disciplined individual.

There are those who mock Jews and Christians who believe God promised the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. But, as noted, even an atheist would have to acknowledge no other people ever established a state there—as Jews have three times—or have claimed it as their own dating back three thousand years.

If you want financial success, you need the self-control to waste little time on fun things that don't contribute to your personal and professional development. If you want happy and healthy children, you need the self-control to spend a great deal of time with them (thus depriving yourself of time to do what you want to do for yourself). If you want to be physically fit, you need the self-control to eat less fattening, less delicious foods and to exercise regularly.

The only way to get what you ultimately want is to deny yourself short-term pleasures that interfere with your goal.

These three steps offer a classic presentation of the way people are often led to do wrong: Exaggerate, then denigrate the other side's motive, then promise a reward.

It is easier to perform surgery than to raise happy, healthy, good children – and surgeons are given years of specialized training, while most of us have to raise human beings from babyhood to adulthood with nothing but our own parents' often very faulty model to guide us.

forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

The happiness that the psychologically impaired achieve through religion alone is often the shallow happiness of the unexamined life.

Any atheist who believes good and evil really exist, or life has a purpose beyond one he or she has made up, or that free will exists, or, for that matter, that science alone will explain how the universe came about, or how life arose from non-life, or how intelligence arose from non-intelligence, has suspended reason in favor of faith.

Evening precedes morning for the simple and even obvious reason that darkness preceded light. Prior to the universe, all was dark. Light needed to be created, not darkness.

One day, however, the thought occurred to me that being unhappy was easy—in fact, the easy way out—and that it took no courage, effort, or greatness to be unhappy. Anyone could be unhappy.

Biology is not destiny; you can be the child of an evil person and be a good person

One of the most important lessons of life—one I believe most people never learn—is that almost everything important is a choice. We choose whether to be happy (or, at the very least whether to act happy), whether to be a hard worker, whether to be honest, whether to be kind, whether to see miracles, and, yes, whether to believe in God (or, at the very least, live as if there is a God).

World Court, two venerated institutions of the Left, which is opposed to all nationalisms (except Palestinian).