Dennis Prager Quotes

The left has lost the common touch.

The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.

The distrust and suspicion which men everywhere evidence toward their adversaries, at all states of historical development, may be regarded as the immediate precursor to the notion of ideology.

The point of Left-wing propaganda is to make us feel powerless.

I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.

Politics is irrational. Politics is about human beings with their frailties and perversions and distortions or perception, who prioritise things according to their conviction.

Left-wing confusion spawns right-wing reaction.

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.

I don’t think America really has a left wing. The American left wing would fit very comfortably in the center or center right of most European political spectrums.

Our friends on the left never met an anti-Communist they liked.

The starting-point in the brochure is not right. To my idea you are mistaken in your judgment regarding the analogy of the West-European revolution with the Russian one, regarding the conditions of the West-European revolution, that is to say the class-relations- and this leads you to mistake the cause, from which this Left Wing, the opposition, originates …. Therefore the brochure SEEMS to be right, as long as your starting-point is assumed. If, however (as it should be), your starting point is rejected, the entire brochure is wrong. As all your mistaken, and partly mistaken, judgments converge …

Nothing is more fallacious than to expect to produce any valuable or permanent results in political projects by relying merely on the reason of men. Men are ... for the most part governed by the impulses of passion.

The common man is impelled and controlled by interests; the superior, by ideas.

Every intellectual attitude is latently political.

The public history of all countries, and all ages, is bet a sort of mask, richly colored. The interior working of the machinery must be foul.

The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.

When I am asked whether the division between the left and the right still has any meaning, the first thought that comes to my mind is that the person who asks the question is not on the left.

Politicians of all stripes are always in danger at looking at every problem from an abstract point of view or being briefed by officials, academics, or economists who know every science but the science of human nature.

The left’s reflex is that if something is good then the government ought to provide it, and some conservatives are falling into the left’s political trap.

The world has changed. People who care nothing about norms can no longer be dismissed as a fringe. For generations, left-wing activists have instructed students and other groups that norms are the building blocks of a rigged system that deprives them of power and denies their “selfless” desires. We don’t want to acknowledge what this has wrought. We have norms because they safeguard foundational principles, such as due process, the presumption of innocence, and freedom from unreasonable and unwarranted police prying. But the Left is no longer attached to those principles.

We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.

That is when the Left is going to love America - when it is not America anymore.

Politically at that time, with Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the White House, it wasn't looking too great for the Left. And we were always on the left.

Tory supporters are not spontaneously ashamed; they have been made to feel ashamed. British leftists fiercely believe they are right - in the sense of correct but also in the sense of just. Conservatives likewise believe they are right-as-in-correct. Yet Tories are less confident about whether their politics are right-as-in-just.

For years Pelosi has been the ultimate Republican boogeyman - or boogeywoman, as it were. She's a frequent target of Republican ire for being too far to the left - and she's also a target among progressives for not being far left enough.