Goodness is about character - integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage, and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.

Happiness is dependent on self-discipline. We are the biggest obstacles to our own happiness. It is much easier to do battle with society and with others than to fight our own nature.

Socialism values equality more than liberty.

As you get older and wiser you realize that when people are given anything without having to earn it (unless they are physically or mentally utterly incapable of earning anything), they become ungrateful and lazy. They also become less happy.

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

Those who believe in nothing are very, very jealous and angry at those who believe in something.

Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.

Conservatives divide the world in terms of good and evil while liberals do it in terms of the rich and poor.

Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.

Complaining not only ruins everybody else's day, it ruins the complainer's day, too. The more we complain, the more unhappy we get.

If there is no God, the labels 'good' and 'evil' are merely opinions. They are substitutes for 'I like it' and 'I don't like it.' They are not objective realities.

More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.

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.

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.

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.'

Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example?

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

Given the amount of unjust suffering and unhappiness in the world, I am deeply grateful for, sometimes even perplexed by, how much misery I have been spared.

In a lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot of meanness.

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.

Therefore the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.

The idea that you earn things - that you earn respect, that you earn income, responsibility, the vote, punishment... these ideas are anathema to the liberal mind.

There's a lot more power in calm than in vituperation.

Liberals tend to put the onus of your success on society and conservatives on you and your family.

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.

Even non-democratic allies no longer trust America. Barack Obama has alienated our most important and longest standing Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both the anti-Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-Iran Arab states have lost respect for him.

Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

For the Left, tolerance does not mean tolerance. It means first, acceptance. And second, celebration. That is totalitarianism: You not only have to live with what you may differ with, dear citizen, you have to celebrate it or pay a steep price.

Much of the world's moral compass is broken. The moral north reads south and the moral south reads north.

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.

Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent.

When Jews left Judaism, they didn't stop being religious. They simply swapped God-based Judaism for godless secular humanism and leftism. For left-wing Jews, Judaism is their ethnicity; leftism is their religion.

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

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.

Those who are compassionate when they should be tough will be tough when they should be compassionate.

The larger the state, the more callous it becomes... the colder its heart. It is also true that the bigger the corporation, the more callous its heart. But unlike the state, corporations have competition and have no police powers.

For all of higher civilization's recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family.

If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

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.

From their teenage years on, children are considerably more capable of causing parents unhappiness than bringing them happiness. That is one reason parents who rely on their children for happiness make both their children and themselves miserable.

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

The last thing Jews need is to create tension with their best friends. And the last thing Christians need is a renewal of Christian hatred toward Jesus' 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.

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.

In little more than a generation, feminism has obliterated roles. If you wonder why so many men choose not to get married, the answer lies in large part in the contemporary devaluation of the husband and of the father - of men as men, in other words.

Two of the many areas of conflict between Judeo-Christian values and leftism concern the separation between the holy and the profane and the separation between humans and animals.

There is little correlation between the circumstances of people's lives and how happy they are.

Virtually nothing Barack Obama has done has left America or the world better since he became president. Nearly everything he has touched has been made worse.

Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

The universities deceive when they say they have no agenda other than to open minds.