2
" I have devoted much of my life to studying, writing, and lecturing about the subject of happiness. In particular, I have advocated that people act as happy as possible even when they do not feel happy. This is, I believe, both a moral obligation to all those who are in our lives—it is unfair to others to inflict our bad moods on them—and a particularly effective way to increase our own happiness, since acting happy elevates one’s mood. This is hardly controversial—in just about every area of life, human beings deeply influence how they feel by how they act. As a rule, those who object to this idea of acting contrary to how one feels are people on the Left—because on the Left, feelings are sacrosanct. "
― Dennis Prager , Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph
6
" A good general rule is that one should seek to be loved by one’s peers—one’s spouse and one’s friends are the best examples—but beyond that, one should first seek to be respected. Seeking to be loved is almost always destructive to non-peer relationships. Teachers, for example, should seek to be respected by their students, not loved. Likewise parents, when raising their children, should not seek to be loved; they need to do too much that may not elicit love in order to raise good and, ironically, loving children. In the liberal world in America, the roles of parents and teachers shifted from authority figures to peers. The results have not been good for children or for society. When one seeks to be loved by those over whom one must exercise authority, one compromises the values necessary to do a proper job. "
― Dennis Prager , Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph
7
" 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
10
" 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
13
" 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
16
" So, if your primary concerns are expansion of the state, material equality, reduction of American power in the world, making America and Europe secular societies, removal of Judeo-Christian influence, substitution of internationalism for nationalism, and making ethnicity and race important values, the left has been a wild success. On the other hand, if your primary concerns are fighting evil, making people nobler, morally elevating societies, and creating conditions for prosperity, the left has been a failure. "
― Dennis Prager , Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph
19
" One upshot of all this is that there is a simple way to produce fewer leftists. 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. That, more than any one other thing will produce fewer leftists, and a better world. Because the happy make the world better and the unhappy make it worse. "
― Dennis Prager , Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph
