Quotes from Dennis Prager

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

From their teenage years on, children are considerably more capable of causing parents unhappiness than bringing them happiness. That is one reason parents who rely on their children for happiness make both their children and themselves miserable.

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.

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

If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.

For all of higher civilization's recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family.

To be told that one can be dependent on one's parents until age 26 should strike a young person who wants to grow up as demeaning, not as something to celebrate.

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.

Every poll about the Left, the Right, and happiness reveals that the farther left one goes, the less happy the person is likely to be.

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.

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

Each of us owes it to our spouse, our children, our friends, to be as happy as we can be. And if you don't believe me, ask a child what it's like to grow up with an unhappy parent, or ask parents what they suffer if they have an unhappy child.

All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it's truer to say that complaining leads to people becoming unhappy.

The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.

People can become addicted to fame, money, and attention as deeply as they become addicted to drugs.

Because gratitude is the key to happiness, anything that undermines gratitude must undermine happiness. And nothing undermines gratitude as much as expectations. There is an inverse relationship between expectations and gratitude: The more expectations you have, the less gratitude you will have.

Wisdom begins with reverence for God." No God, no wisdom (witness your local university).

You cannot be happy if your primary identity is that of a victim, even if you really are one.

Whatever one does for a living, three questions need to be confronted before it is too late: What really matters to me? What price do my spouse and kids pay for my career success? What price does my soul pay?

There is nothing about a Ph.D. that guarantees a person will be wiser, kinder, or more ethical than someone with only a high school education.

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.

Goodness is about character - integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage, and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.

If the West believed in something, it would prevail overnight. The problem is you can't beat bad faith with no faith.

Unhappy poor people at least have the fantasy that money will make them happy; unhappy rich people don't even have that.