Dennis Prager Quotes

Tolerance obviously does not disturb the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.

Really, all religious teachings can be boiled down to: “Just be cool. Don’t be an asshole.

Every good teaching may still end up producing evil bandits who have no principles whatsoever, an outcome even more likely when the teacher is also a bandit.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.

You can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.

It is good insofar as it is not evil.

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Nothing has ever moulded our conscience so strongly as our knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

You can compromise between good, better, and best, and you can compromise between bad and worse and terrible. But you can't compromise between good and evil. And now people look at the other side as a completely different kind of animal and say, 'They are taking the country down the road to purgatory.' It's complete intolerance.

It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.

For children to take morality seriously they must be in the presence of adults who take morality seriously. And with their own eyes they must see adults take morality seriously.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.

If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it.

Whilst that the childe is young, let him be instructed in vertue and lytterature.

All names of good and evil are images; they do not speak out, they only hint. He is a fool who seeks knowledge from them.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.