The Right Side of History Quotes

“a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in the best world that has ever existed.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the “greater” good. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting the values of the collective and a new utopian vision of “social justice”—and they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“We believe freedom is built upon the twin notions that God created every human in His image, and that human beings are capable of investigating and exploring God’s world. Those notions were born in Jerusalem and Athens, respectively.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Nazism didn’t arise from consumerism. It arose from communal purpose overriding individual purpose, and individual capacity abandoned in favor of worship of the communal capacity of the state. Nazism, in other words, lay a lot closer to Marxism than capitalism did.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Happiness, then, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“The creation story itself is designed to demonstrate how the first man, Adam, used his innate power of choice wrongly—and we are all Adam’s descendants.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“That virtue took the form of courage—willingness to sacrifice life, fortune, and sacred honor in pursuit of defending the rights necessary to pursue virtue itself. That virtue took the form of temperance—no better founding document has ever been penned than the Constitution of the United States, the product of compromise. That virtue took the form of prudence—the practical wisdom of The Federalist Papers has not yet been surpassed in political thought. And that virtue took the form of justice—the rule of law, not of men, and the creation of a system where each receives his due.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Like the Bible, Aristotle didn’t define happiness as temporary joy. He saw happiness in a life well-lived.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“To Aristotle, “good” wasn’t a subjective term, something for each of us to define for ourselves; “good” was a statement of objective fact. Something was “good” if it fulfilled its purpose. A good watch tells time; a good dog defends its master. What does a good human being do? Acts in accordance with right reason.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Thomas Jefferson didn’t write that the government was granted power to grant you happiness: it was there to protect your pursuit of happiness. The government existed to protect your rights, to prevent those rights from being infringed upon. The government was there to stop someone from stealing your horse, from butchering you in your sleep, from letting his cow graze on your land. At no point did Jefferson suggest that government could achieve happiness. None of the Founders thought it could.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“What makes human beings unique, says Aristotle, is our capacity to reason, and to use that reason to investigate the nature of the world and our purpose in it:”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Where the Athenians were tepid with regard to individual purpose in the absence of community, they were religious in their belief in individual capacity. They passionately advocated the notion of an order to the universe, and insisted repeatedly that mankind had not just the capacity but the obligation to uncover that order.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“The first contribution of the ancient Greeks was the philosophy of natural law.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can’t provide happiness in and of itself.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“The French Revolution, then, led not only to the rise of the nation-state and nationalism more broadly, it also opened the door to total war—the end of the distinction between civilian and military, and the willingness to weaponize an entire population toward the ends of governments.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“The Founding Fathers were devotees of Cicero and Locke, of the Bible and Aristotle.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Finally, we must believe that we are pursuing true goals—not merely effective ones. Darwinian evolution leaves no room for the true; it only leaves room for the evolutionarily beneficial.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“The Passions of men,” Hobbes writes, “are commonly more potent than their Reason.” Reason cannot bring happiness, nor can it be used as the goal of a philosophical life. There is no happiness. There is only striving and security and passion. Reason cannot save us from the war of all against all; only the Leviathan, the power of the state, can.21”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Instead, morality must be boiled down to mere competition of interests, and the desire of human beings to avoid suffering and untimely death. In a state of nature, “nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice.”5 If moral relativism began anywhere, it began in Hobbes.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Bacon wanted to turn the pursuit of knowledge toward “the benefit and use of men . . . for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“The fight against entropy is never over.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Mostafa El-Bermawy of Wired.com suggests, “From your Facebook feed to your Google Search, as your experience online grows increasingly personalized, the internet’s islands keep getting more segregated and sound proofed. . . . Without realizing it, we develop tunnel vision.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“You Can Do It. Forge forth and conquer. Build. Cultivate. You were given the ability to choose your path in life--and you were born into the freest civilization in the history of mankind. Make the most of it. You are not a victim. In a free society, you are responsible for your actions. Your successes are your accomplishments, but they are also the legacy of those who came before you and those who stand with you; your failures are purely your own. Look to your own house before blaming the society that bore you. And if society is acting to violate individual rights, it is your job to change it. You are a human being, made in the image of God, bound to the earth but with a soul that dreams of the eternal. There is no greater risk and no greater opportunity than that.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great