Dennis Prager

No American conservative has ever argued that the government should never be involved in peoples' lives. That is anarchy, and we don't argue for that.

Leftists' meanness toward those with whom they differ has no echo on the normative right.

The problem for the Left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the Right as vile, it has to argue the issues.

The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism.

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

The whole American experiment has been predicated on giving individuals as much control over their own lives as possible.

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.

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.

In various European countries, it is increasingly common for young men to live with their parents into their 30s and even longer. Why not? In the welfare state, there is no shame in doing so.

Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.

The biggest obstacle to people becoming better is that you have to really want to be a good person in order to be a better person, and most people would rather be other things.

People confuse goodness with weakness. It is weak people, not good people (goodness demands strength), who are taken advantage of.

But if there is a just God, there is ultimate justice.

I am convinced that great ideas that are powerfully presented can change a mind in five minutes.

Most people who call themselves conservatives can't explain the American value system.

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.

No day passes without a Democratic politician, a left-wing commentator, or, if I may be excused a redundancy, a left-wing academic labeling Republicans and conservatives racist.

Most blacks want school vouchers, but most liberals vehemently oppose them. Why? Because what is good for teachers' unions is of more importance to the Left than what is good for blacks. Who, then, is racist? By their own admission, and by the policies they pursue, the answer is the people who call themselves progressive.

In colleges throughout America, students are taught to have disdain for the white race. I know this sounds incredible, or at least exaggerated. It is neither.

In the biblical worldview, the purpose of all creation is to benefit man. This anthropocentric view of nature, and indeed of the whole universe, is completely at odds with the current secular idealization of nature. This secular view posits that nature has its own intrinsic meaning and purpose, independent of man.

All of creation, in the biblical view, was to ultimately prepare the way for the creation of man. But one does not need the Bible alone to hold this view. A purely scientific reading of the universe is in keeping with this view. Everything - every natural and physical law - is exquisitely tuned to produce life, and ultimately man, on earth.

Given the unprecedented ignorance of the Bible in contemporary America, it is likely that more young Americans will only know the Noah of 'Noah.' We can only hope that the film offers even a fraction of the wisdom of the original.

Having travelled to some 20 African countries, I find myself, like so many other visitors to Africa before me, intoxicated with the continent. And I am not referring to the animals, as much as I have been enthralled by them during safaris in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Rather, I am referring to the African peoples.

There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old. This fact must lead all reasonable human beings, that is, all human beings who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not basically good.

Africans who immigrate to America know how little racism exists there. They suspect it before emigrating from Africa, and they know it after arriving in America. Indeed, America, the Left's depiction of it notwithstanding, is the least racist country in the world.

Corruption is Africa's greatest problem. Not poverty. Not lack of riches. Not racism.

Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media, and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion. It has taken over Western schools from elementary through graduate.

With the demise of the biblical religions that have provided the American people with their core values since their country's inception, we are reverting to the pagan worldview. Trees and animals are venerated, while man is simply one more animal in the ecosystem - and largely a hindrance, not an asset.

Society may no longer define marriage in the only way marriage has ever been defined in the annals of recorded history. Many societies allowed polygamy, many allowed child marriages, some allowed marriage within families; but none, in thousands of years, defined marriage as the union of people of the same sex.

The notion that there is no basic value system is far more incoherent or invalid than the notion that there are essential values. Every religion can tell you it has basic values. You ask a Christian, most Christians would say love God and love your neighbor. Is that the entirety of Christianity? No one in his right mind would say it is.

Every age has found some alternative to American values appealing. The number of Western intellectuals enamored of fascism and all the various expressions of Marxism was legion.

Our only hope for America is that every conservative takes upon him or herself the project of learning what American and conservative values are, coming to understand what leftism stands for, and learning how to make the case for those values to women, young people, blacks and Hispanics.

For conservatives, the issue is that for generations now, they have failed to make the case for their values. They haven't even conveyed conservative values to many of their children. And when they have, the university has often succeeded in undoing them.

Obviously, the issue for the Left isn't aging white males; it is conservatives, whether they are young or old, white or nonwhite, male or female. If female aborigines were conservative, the Left would have a problem with female aborigines.

Without aging white males, I doubt the 'New York Times' would survive. How many young people, females, Hispanics and blacks subscribe to the 'New York Times?'

Since neither black animosity nor the Left's falsehood of 'racial tensions' is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America could do will affect either many blacks' perceptions or the leftist libel.

Once one understands that 'racial tensions' is a euphemism for a black animosity toward whites and a left-wing construct, one begins to understand why the election of a black president has had no impact on most blacks or on the left.

The election, and even the re-election, of a black man as president, in a country that is 87 percent non-black - a first in human history - has had no impact on what are called 'racial tensions.'

The greatest hope most Americans - including Republicans - had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country's president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations.

There is no benefit to the conservative sinner in being a conservative. There is great benefit to the liberal sinner in being a liberal.

There is something about liberalism that is not nearly as true about conservatism. The further left one goes, the more one finds that the ideology provides moral cover for a life that is not moral. While many people left of center lead fine personal lives, many do not.

The Left has taken over the universities and, increasingly, high schools and elementary schools. It dominates the news and entertainment media. And many judges and courts are leftist - meaning that their decisions are guided by leftism more than by the law or the Constitution.

I have never written that there is a threat of fascism in America. I always considered the idea overwrought. But now I believe there really is such a threat - and it will come draped not in an American flag, but in the name of tolerance and health.

There have been huge Muslim demonstrations against cartoons depicting Muhammad and any other perceived insult against Islam. But I am unaware of a single demonstration of Muslims against Muslim terror directed at non-Muslims.

American troops around the globe are the greatest preservers of liberty and peace in the world.

Those indoctrinated by leftist thinking become largely incapable of making accurate moral judgments.

I have known Tavis Smiley since the 1980s, when we both worked at the same radio station in Los Angeles. He is smart, and he is a gentleman who has accorded me great respect both on and off the air.

There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.

When watching 'The Passion,' Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films. For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange the killing and torture of the Christians' Savior.