The Ten Commandments Quotes

“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.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Freedom comes from moral self-control. There is no other way to achieve it.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Second, honoring parents is how nearly all of us come to recognize that there is a moral authority above us to whom we are morally accountable.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Societies are preoccupied with just about everything other than making good people. For some, it is intelligence. Parents are often more concerned with their children’s IQs than their children’s characters. And many people confuse higher education with decency and moral insight.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“People who know the difference between right and wrong do the wrong thing all the time. You know why? Because they can.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Without God, right and wrong are just personal beliefs. Personal opinions. I think shoplifting is okay, you don’t.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Sigmund 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, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“people who choose to work seven days a week are essentially slaves”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“A father and a mother who are not honored are essentially adult peers of their children. They are not parents. No generation knows better than ours the terrible consequences of growing up without a father. Fatherless boys are far more likely to grow up and commit violent crime, mistreat women, and act out against society in every other way. Girls who do not have a father to honor—and, hopefully, to love as well—are more likely to seek the wrong men and to be promiscuous at an early age.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Another problem with the view that you don’t need God to believe that murder is wrong is that a lot of people haven’t shared your view. And you don’t have to go back very far in history to prove this. In the twentieth century millions of people in Communist societies and under Nazism killed about one hundred million people—and that doesn’t count a single soldier killed in war. So, don’t get too confident about people’s ability to figure out right from wrong without a Higher Authority.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“People who murder in the name of God not only kill their victims, they kill God, too.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Why, then, do the Ten Commandments include a law that prohibits a thought? Because it is coveting that so often leads to evil. Or, to put it another way, coveting is what leads to violating the preceding four commandments—the ones against murder, adultery, stealing, and perjury.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“A society can survive bad donkey drivers. But it cannot survive contempt for truth—whether inside or outside a courtroom.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“What does it mean to “carry” or to “misuse” God’s name? It means committing evil in God’s name. And that God will not forgive. Why not? When an irreligious person commits evil, it doesn’t bring God and religion into disrepute. But when religious people commit evil, especially in God’s name, they are not only committing evil, they are doing terrible damage to the name of God.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“the Sabbath almost singlehandedly creates and strengthens family ties and friendships. When a person takes off from work one day every week, that day almost inevitably becomes a day spent with other people—namely, family and/or friends. It has similar positive effects on marriages. Ask anyone married to a workaholic how good it would be for their marriage if the workaholic would not work for one day each week—and you can appreciate the power of the Sabbath Day.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“We 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.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“So why did the King James translation of the Bible use the word ‘kill’ rather than ‘murder’? Because four hundred years ago when the translation was made, ‘kill’ was synonymous with ‘murder.’ As a result, some people don’t realize that English has changed since 1610 and therefore think that the Ten Commandments prohibit all killing. But, of course, they don’t. If the Ten Commandments forbade killing, we would all have to be vegetarians—killing animals would be prohibited. And we would all have to be pacifists—since we could not kill even in self-defense.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“The Hebrew original does not say, ‘Do not kill.’ It says, ‘Do not murder.’ Both Hebrew and English have two words for taking a life—one is “kill” (harag, , in Hebrew) and the other is “murder” (ratsach, , in Hebrew). Kill means: 1.Taking any life—whether of a human being or an animal. 2.Taking a human life deliberately or by accident. 3.Taking a human life legally or illegally, morally or immorally. On the other hand, murder can only mean one thing: The illegal or immoral taking of a human life. That’s why we say, ‘I killed a mosquito,’ not ‘I murdered a mosquito.’ And that’s why we would say, ‘The worker was accidentally killed,’ not ‘The worker was accidentally murdered.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Unless there is a God, all morality is just opinion and belief. And virtually every atheist philosopher has acknowledged this.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“The Ten Commandments are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society. But such a society cannot be created or maintained if it is not based on truth.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“None of the Ten Commandments concern what humans must do “for” God;”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“With all our sophistication, the remarkable fact is that the Ten Commandments are more or less all we need.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“There were slave traders, Nazis, and Communists who were compassionate in their personal lives, but all of them told, and most of them believed, some great lie that enabled them to participate in a great evil. Black slavery was made possible in large measure by the lie that blacks were innately inferior to whites.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“The Ten Commandments are preoccupied with goodness. Each commandment is a moral tour de force. Together they present the most compelling plan ever devised for a better life and good world. Yet, they were written—and in the eyes of hundreds of millions, revealed by the Creator—three thousand years ago. The Ten Commandments are what began humanity’s long, arduous journey toward moral progress.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“However, one big obstacle to truth-telling is that believers in causes, including good causes, that don’t place truth as a central value, will be very tempted to lie on behalf of their cause.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“The Ten Commandments are there to warn all of us that, with very few exceptions, such as the immediate saving of innocent life, no cause is more important than truth-telling. The Ten Commandments are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society. But such a society cannot be created or maintained if it is not based on truth.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Neither the Ten Commandments nor the Bible elsewhere commands us to love our parents. This is particularly striking given that the Bible commands us to love our neighbor, to love God, and to love the stranger. The Bible understands that there will always be individuals who, for whatever reason, do not love a parent. Therefore, it does not demand what may be psychologically or emotionally impossible. But it does demand that we show honor to our parents. And it makes this demand only with regard to parents. There is no one else whom the Bible commands us to honor.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“If you build a society in which children honor their parents, your society will long survive. And the corollary is: a society in which children do not honor their parents is doomed to self-destruction. In our time, this connection between honoring parents and maintaining civilization is not widely recognized.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“We 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 fail”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“Any moral system that is detached from God, no matter how noble and sincerely held, will likewise fail.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code