Still the Best Hope Quotes

“The phrase ‘separation of church and state,’ which appears in no founding document (only in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson), means that America must never have a state religion, not that the state be indifferent to religion.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“Whatever sins Christians engaged in the past, and they were extensive, the fact is that the most humane and decent countries in the world nearly all have Christian origins. That is not true of states that grew out of Islam.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“One of the credos of my life is taken from Viktor Frankl, a Jewish survivor of Nazi concentration camps, who was a psychiatrist and author. In his highly influential book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he related that after the war someone asked him if he ‘hated the German race.’ He responded that he did not because in his view, ‘There are only two races, the decent and the indecent.’ That is how I divide the world. Not between Muslim and non-Muslim, black and white, or American and non-American, but between the decent and indecent. The issues I raise about Islam are not about the decency of Muslims, but about whether Islam in its traditional Islamist configuration is more or less likely than the American value system to produce good societies.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“The Palestinian refugee problem could have easily been solved in 1948, just as virtually every other refugee problem in the world has been; and just as the refugee problem of the 800,000 Jews who fled Arab countries during and after 1948 was solved. But, since 1948, Arab countries have deliberately mistreated the Palestinian refugees by refusing to integrate them into their countries and by keeping them in refugee camps—the only refugees in the world to be kept in camps for three generations. The Arab countries did this so as to keep the world’s attention focused on the plight of the Palestinian refugees and to use them as a way to defame and ultimately, they hope, delegitimize and de-Judaize Israel.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“The Left, which dominates the media, the arts, and most of intellectual life in the West, has rendered criticism of Christianity and Zionism acceptable, even laudable, but criticism of Islam unacceptable. Why has the Left done this? Because the enemy (radical Islam) of my enemy (America and Israel) is my friend, and because the Muslim world is regarded as the underdog vis-à-vis powerful America and Israel, and the Left supports what it perceives as the underdog.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“The number of innocents killed by Leftist movements dwarfs the numbers killed by any other movement in a comparable period of time at any time in history, and certainly in the modern world. The Church, a favorite target of the Left, hardly competes. For example, in its nearly five hundred years of existence the Inquisition killed approximately five thousand people. And that ended more than five hundred years ago, when barbarity was the norm.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“The Leftist worldview sees society’s and the world’s great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil.
Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites who venerated a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free, decent, and prosperous America that has greater inequality.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“It is America (or Israel) at war, not just any war, that disturbs the Left. That is why there have been few demonstrations, and none of any size, against the mass murder of Sudan’s blacks; the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Congo; China’s crushing of Tibet; or Saddam Hussein’s wars against Iran, Kuwait, and Iraq’s own Kurds. Though there are always admirable individual exceptions, the Left has not been nearly as vocal about these large scale atrocities as it is about America’s wars. One additional reason is that, in general, atrocities committed by non-whites rarely interest the Left—and therefore ‘world opinion,’ which is essentially the same thing as Leftist opinion.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“America was always a religious country, and it remains the most religious of industrialized Western democracies. America derived its strength from religion, not secularism.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“It was not the creation of 760,000 Arab-Palestinian refugees that has created this hatred. It was this hatred that created the refugees. Had six Arab armies not attacked Israel to destroy it in 1948, there would not have been any refugees.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“As for terror against Israelis, Palestinian Muslim terror emanates from a desire to destroy Israel, not from Israel’s conduct regarding Palestinians, whether occupation, settlements, or checkpoints. One proof is that the greatest amount of Palestinian terror against Israel was unleashed after Israel agreed to give up nearly all of the West Bank to the Palestinians at the end of 2000. Islamist terror against Israel is the result of Muslim, especially Arab Muslim, desires to annihilate the one non-Muslim state in the midst of the Arab world. For most Arab Muslims and for all Islamists, the Middle East is supposed to be under Muslim rule. There is no place for a Christian Lebanon or for a Jewish Israel, no matter what its borders. That Israel is Jewish is all the more an affront to many Muslims. Jews are supposed to have dhimmi status under Muslim rule, and no Muslim should be under Jewish rule.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“From Marx until today, victim groups have played an indispensable role in Leftist success. Without victim groups, the Left cannot succeed.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“One of the most often asked questions posed after America was attacked on 9/11 was, ‘What has the United States done to arouse so much Muslim hatred?’ The question, however, is on the same moral level as asking what German and other European Jews did to cause the Holocaust, or what blacks did to arouse the hatred among the American whites who lynched them.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“The Left’s great fight is with material inequality, not with evil as normally understood. Thus, the Left has always been less interested in fighting tyranny than in fighting inequality. That is why Leftist dictators—from Lenin to Mao to Pol Pot to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez—have had so much support from Leftists around the world. Many of these dictators were mass murderers, but to much of the world’s Left it was more important that they opposed material inequality (and America).”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“Leftist university professors in Western Europe and the United States have also been agitated about one other country’s wars—Israel’s. Hence the numerous attempts by Leftist professors at Western universities to boycott Israeli professors and universities. But, of course, Chinese professors and universities are not only exempt from boycotts; they are enthusiastically sought after despite the lack of elementary freedoms in China, the Chinese government’s incarceration of dissidents in psychiatric wards, the decimation of much of Tibetan culture, and the increasing Chinese occupation of that ancient country.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“The 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, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“As of the second decade in the twenty-first century, nearly all acts of terror around the world (as opposed to acts of terror confined to one country, as in the case of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) have been committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. Of course the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But this frequently noted fact is meaningless. The vast majority of Germans were not members of the Gestapo, nor were the vast majority of Russians members of the Communist Party, let alone the KGB. Not only is international terror overwhelmingly Muslim, but there are virtually no terrorists committing terror in the name of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other religion.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“The world’s thinking is morally confused because it is informed by the morally confused.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“If the question is ‘How do we stop enormous evils in the world?’ the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently ‘War.’ Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed ‘war is not the answer.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“The Left would like to believe that racism—not the breakdown of marriage and family, the absence of religious norms, a degraded popular culture, and other issues that all concern values—is the primary impediment to black progress in America. Therefore the Left declares racism the greatest impediment to black progress.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“Raise children who are grateful in general, and grateful to be an American in particular, or grateful to be the citizen of any decent country, who don't complain much, who learn to handle losing, and who are guided by values, not feelings. In other words, teach them how to be happy adults.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“The good performed by some of United Nations institutions, such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF, has been outweighed by the amount of bad the UN has either abetted or allowed. It has enabled genocide in Rwanda, done little or nothing to stop genocide in the Congo and Sudan, given a respectable forum to tyrannies, convened conferences (the Durban Conferences on racism) that simply became forums for anti-Semitism, and been preoccupied with vilifying one of its relatively few humane states, Israel. Its moral failings were further exemplified by its placing Qaddafi’s Libya on its Human Rights Commission, Iran on its Commission on the Status of Women, and North Korea on the Nuclear Disarmament Commission. It is not that the people who run the United Nations are bad people; it is that the United Nations is run by a majority of the world’s governments, and they are run by bad people. Without America in the Security Council, the bad would nearly always prevail.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“Who, pray tell, is for leaving the naked unclothed and the hungry without food? Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism advocated caring for the helpless millennia before Marx was born. So, when the Jewish, Christian, or secular Left tell us repeatedly that they are for clothing the naked, they really mean two other things: (1) Their opponents are not for feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and (2) Only those who affirm Left-wing policies are.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“As of the second decade in the twenty-first century, nearly all acts of terror around the world (as opposed to acts of terror confined to one country, as in the case of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) have been committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. Of course the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But this frequently noted fact is meaningless.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“World opinion”—that vapid, amoral concept— deems the murder of members of one’s group less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in Congo elicits virtually no attention from “world opinion.” Between 1998 and 2008, according to the International Rescue Committee, 5.4 million people in Congo were killed, and virtually no one in the world knows this. But if a few Iraqi prisoners are sexually humiliated in an American-run prison, or if one Palestinian dies at the hands of an Israeli soldier, the story is on the front pages of the world’s newspapers.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“Virtually every news source lists the greater number of Palestinians killed in Arab-Israeli wars in order to depict the Israelis as guilty (of ‘disproportionate response’). Had similar reporting taken place during World War II, the Western Allies would have been deemed the villains since Germany and Japan lost far more civilians than America or Britain.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“Universities are the most anti-Israel mainstream institutions in America. And Westerns journalists nearly always use militant or gunman to describe Islamist terrorists. For Reuters, BBC, the Associated Press, CNN, and nearly all newspapers, it violates moral neutrality to label even a man attempting to smash a bomb-laden car into a nightclub a terrorist.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“A 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, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“Most people know there is no country in the world more accepting of strangers than is America. After three generations, people who have emigrated to Germany or France or Sweden do not feel—and are not regarded as—fully German, French, or Swedish. Yet anyone of any background from any country is regarded as fully American the moment he or she becomes one. The country that the Left routinely calls ‘xenophobic’ and ‘racist’ is, in fact, the least racist and xenophobic in the world.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“It is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s Left that hates America. However, because the Left dominates the world’s news media and because nearly everyone, understandably, relies on the news media for their understanding of what happens in the world, many people, including Americans, believe that ‘the world’ hates America. And, of course, the Left-dominated media help to create much of the hatred for America that does exist. If I relied exclusively on the New York Times or Le Monde or the Guardian or CNN International or virtually any of the world’s major television and radio news stations and newspapers for all I knew about America, I would probably hold it in contempt as well.”
― Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph