Ben Shapiro Quotes

Facts don't care about your feelings.

There is no such thing as 'your truth'. There is the truth and your opinion.

Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion.

Never in our country’s history has a generation been so empowered, so wealthy, so privileged—and yet so empty.

A man may be judged by his standard of entertainment as easily as by the standard of his work.

Ronald Reagan was not a god. He himself would have said that. Don’t follow people. Follow principle.

Freedom of speech and thought matters, especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people for engaging in thought it dislikes, thought crime becomes a reality.

When someone calls you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because you happen to disagree with them about tax policy or same-sex marriage or abortion, that’s bullying. When someone slanders you because you happen to disagree with them about global warming or the government shutdown, that’s bullying. When someone labels you a bad human being because they disagree with you, they are bullying you. They are attacking your character without justification. That’s nasty. In fact, it makes them nasty.

The left no longer makes arguments about policies’ effectiveness. Their only argument is character assassination.

There will be no conversation in which you call me a racist, and I explain why I’m not a racist. That’s a conversation for idiots.

The leftist philosophy of violence is simple: It’s good when it’s being used for leftist causes. It’s bad when it’s being used for any other purpose.

is not right that children be dunked headfirst into the vat of garbage we call popular culture.

It is the left that uses the clubs of race and class to attack those on the right; it is the left that labels religious people and traditional values people rubes and simpletons,

a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.

And the leftist bullies use that nonconstitutional phrase as a baton with which to club their opponents into submission. Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church & State,” a phrase from his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, was meant not to prevent people from expressing religion in the public square but to prevent government from infringing on religious freedom.

Nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism are natural results of the chaotic existential subjectivism popularized by the Left. If the hallmark of the baby boomers was rebellion, the hallmark of my generation is jadedness. Nothing really matters—we’re cosmically alone.

The Constitution designed the separation of church and state to prevent people from imposing their particular religions on others, not to stop people from allowing their religious beliefs to influence their views on public policy.

It’s far more common for leftists to routinely pick up weapons and try to kill those with whom they disagree than it is for those on the other side of the ideological spectrum.

The combination of parental abdication and social liberalism in our schools means that kids are easy targets for nihilism and moral subjectivism.

No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.

We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in the best world that has ever existed.

In place of moral absolutes, they promote moral relativism and sometimes even question the very existence of truth and reality. To them truth and reality are what we subjectively perceive them to be.

The truth is that your opponent, who labels you a racist without evidence, is the actual racist: it is he who waters down the term racism until it is meaningless by labeling any argument with which he disagrees racist.

Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.

Don’t follow people. Follow principle.

I've never seen anyone's life get better by complaining about reality, I've seen it get better by accepting reality as it is and then making personal decisions to make it better.

Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

But straw men are easier to knock down than real arguments.

Okay, forget about the disrespect, facts don’t care about your feelings. It, turns out that every chromosome, every cell in Caitlyn Jenner’s body, is male, with the exception of some of his sperm cells. … It turns out that he still has all of his male appendages. How he feels on the inside is irrelevant to the question of his biological self.

greatest films ever made originate largely in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s—a period when Hollywood worked

No wonder the left seeks to avoid political debate at all costs. Why bother? Members of the left are not interested in having a debate about policy. They are not interested in debating what is right or wrong for the country. They are interested in debating you personally. They are interested in castigating you as a nasty human being because you happen to disagree. This is what makes leftists leftists: an unearned sense of moral superiority over you. And if they can instill that sense of moral superiority in others by making you the bad guy, they will.

Tolerance fails as a virtue, first of all, because it is in some ways demeaning to people. It is much better to speak of “respect” or “empathy.” But that is precisely the problem—common sense tells us that there are people who cannot and ought not to command our respect or empathy. We regard what they stand for as stupid, crazy, evil, or all three. To be respectful of them would be to abandon all moral sense, so that a completely tolerant person would be totally passive, without a moral center. Thus we fall back on “tolerance,” which merely means conceding to people the right to be who they are, while withholding our respect. But the determined advocates of tolerance are not content with that and keep slipping back into making tolerance imply the necessity of respect . . . Thus the obligation of tolerance leads inexorably to intolerance, turning the claim to be tolerant into a tautology, a statement that merely repeats itself—“I am tolerant except about those things of which I am intolerant.

As L. Brent Bozell pointed out at the time, just because society is in decay doesn’t mean that Hollywood should be exacerbating that decay.

The secular bullies believe they have an exclusive patent on scientific knowledge.

The left’s anti-bullying stance is an enormous lie. It is a purposeful lie. It is a lie designed to disguise the fact that leftists are the greatest group of bullies in American history.

When doctors don’t know what is causing a disease or how to cure it, they call it a syndrome. When sociologists don’t know what is causing a problem or how to cure it, they call it systemic.

Baby boomers and their music rebelled against parents because they were parents—nurturing, attentive, and overly present (as those teenagers often saw it) authority figures. Today’s teenagers and their music rebel against parents because they are not parents—not nurturing, not attentive, and often not even there.

The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the “greater” good. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.

The race bullies win by relying on racial guilt. But collective racial guilt can only separate Americans. We are individuals, not homogenous members of racial subsets. Only when we learn to cherish the words of Martin Luther King, judging people as individuals, will we truly have the guts to stand up to the race bullies. After all, to paraphrase a man who once stood for unification rather than division, we're not black America or white America. We're the United States of America. We're brothers and sisters. If we don't begin to recognize that simple truth -- and recognize the inherent goodness of America, and our ability to look beyond skin color and ethnic heritage -- the race bullies will continue to tear American down for their own political gain, brick by brick.

Their latest label for religious people is “American Taliban.” The left loves it. It’s meant to denigrate Christians as potential threats to world peace (although the greatest threats of the last century, Nazism and communism, were both secular).

The new authority figures of the porn generation are many, and nearly all are members of a coarsened pop culture—one fed by the destructive malaise of the relativist world.

Don’t get caught in the trap of believing you have to know everything about everything

You know what's fun? Christmas lights. They are twinkly an pretty and they make me happy, because they are twinkly and pretty.

We believe freedom is built upon the twin notions that God created every human in His image, and that human beings are capable of investigating and exploring God’s world. Those notions were born in Jerusalem and Athens, respectively.

All this was lies. It was nasty, baseless, and ridiculous—there was far more evidence of anti-Semitism in the Occupy movement than there was evidence of racism within the Tea Party. But that didn’t stop the media from trying. In fact, they and their friends tried so hard to label the Tea Party racist that they stooped to planting faux racists, including faux Nazis, at Tea Parties, just to gin up racial controversy. The Tea Parties threw the infiltrators out.

The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting the values of the collective and a new utopian vision of “social justice”—and they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings.

College students’ sense of moral righteousness doesn’t come from achievement – it comes from believing that you are a bad person. You are a racist and sexist; they are not. That makes them good, even if they don’t give charity, have never met a black person, stand for policies that impoverish minority communities across the United States, and enable America-haters around the globe. It

If Obama learned one thing from FDR, it was that every socialist needs his foot soldiers.

left’s favorite three lines of attack are (1) you’re stupid; (2) you’re mean; (3) you’re corrupt. Sarah

Government cannot change the hearts of human beings—it cannot make them that which they are not.

Happiness, then, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity.

The left is expert at framing debates. They have buzzwords they use to direct the debate toward unwinnable positions for you. They are tolerant, diverse, fighters for social justice; if you oppose them, by contrast, you are intolerant, xenophobic, and in favor of injustice. Now, all these terms are – to be polite – a crock, if considered as absolute moral values. The left is wildly intolerant of religious people and conservatives; that’s why they’re interested in forcing Christian bakers to cater to same-sex weddings. They are anti-intellectual diversity, particularly in areas of American life in which they predominate; that’s why they stifle conservatism on campus and in the media. And as for social justice, if social is supposed to be opposed to individual, then social justice is by definition unjust. The left’s use of magical buzzwords places you in a corner, against supposed universal values that aren’t universal or universally held.

This sort of bullying isn’t just present at the universities. It has taken over the media wholesale. For the media, all arguments are character arguments. If you disagree with the members of the media about something, you are a fundamentally bad human being. The same is eminently true in Hollywood, where moral narrative is the heart of the business.

Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the forces of moral relativism, radical feminism, and generational nihilism have gradually destroyed the foundation of our own greatness. Instead of adopting stronger moral standards, our society has embraced the lure of personal fulfillment.

Real-life teens wish they could live like the teens Hollywood promotes. Everyone has sex, and relationships are deep and meaningful, even if they only last a couple episodes. There are never any consequences to any action, except for experiencing the angst of teenage life alongside the characters. When a generation becomes desensitized to the ramifications of the culture around them, it’s natural to seek out any sort of feeling, even angst.

Black culture has contributed hugely to American society: The civil rights movement brought meaning to American notions of equality and freedom; black contributions to politics, science, music, and art have helped enrich all of us. To demean these accomplishments and contributions by listing rap among them is to demean black culture as a whole.

Hypocrisy as humor pushes destruction of standards.

And as for social justice, if social is supposed to be opposed to individual, then social justice is by definition unjust. The

Unless you are willing to force people using the law to go to medical school, you cannot have a successful universal healthcare system. That

For the media, all arguments are character arguments. If you disagree with the members of the media about something, you are a fundamentally bad human being. The

That’s the way it will go because that’s how the left wins: through intimidation and cruelty. You

Rule #2: Hit First. Don’t take the punch first. Hit first. Hit hard. Hit where it counts. Mike

This is what makes leftists leftists: an unearned sense of moral superiority over you.

Without God, there is no right and wrong ... Anything goes. Life loses value, and with that loss of value comes a loss of societal strength.

After all, lies about guaranteed security are far more seductive than lectures about personal responsibility.

You may notice when arguing with someone on the left that every time you begin to make a point, that leftist begins shouting

The creation story itself is designed to demonstrate how the first man, Adam, used his innate power of choice wrongly—and we are all Adam’s descendants.

Markets are natural outgrowths of human nature, and natural rights. You own yourself, and you own your labor—and no one has the right to remove that labor from you for the good of the collective without just compensation.

This type of rhetoric is all too common among secularists on the left. They paint a false dichotomy between religion and science. They say that religious people are anti-science, because science makes God irrelevant—therefore, religious people want to stop scientific progress. They point to the fact that many religious people are skeptical about the theory of evolution—as though skepticism of a scientific finding were in and of itself unscientific.

Turning a blind eye to evil, however, doesn’t make it disappear. It allows it to grow. And those who allow evil to grow in order to protect their own convenience will be held accountable for the end results of the evil they facilitate.

You have to look like you’re a nice person in order for people to believe that you are a nice person. Scientific studies show that people will judge you literally within milliseconds of seeing you. Make them see what you want them to see.

Nazism didn’t arise from consumerism. It arose from communal purpose overriding individual purpose, and individual capacity abandoned in favor of worship of the communal capacity of the state. Nazism, in other words, lay a lot closer to Marxism than capitalism did.

What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.

Since America is, by all available metrics, incredibly tolerant and open, it has grown more and more difficult to find instances of true oppression in America. When demand for victimization narratives exceeded supply, Disintegrationists mine American history for such oppression, then declare that modern ills can be attributed to historical injustices. Sometimes, to some extent, that is the case. But the outsize attempt to pin modern, continuing ills on events centuries old wears thin for those who would rather solve problems than create them.

the Supreme Court of the United States is supposed to be free of politics. That’s why these legalistic doofuses in silly-looking robes get a lifetime appointment and a free supply of arrogance to go with it. They’re not supposed to be susceptible to bullying—upholding the Constitution is supposed to be a bully-free job.

The attempt [by the far-left] to boil down fascism to 'anything I don't like' is simply idiotic. Which is more fascist: Christina Hoff Sommers coming to speak about the lies of the feminist movement, or the people who are suggesting that they should actually be able to shut down her lecture by use of force? That seems a little more fascist to me.

A 1992 survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs revealed that while 81 percent of the country as a whole felt that adultery was wrong, only 49 percent of Hollywood did. While only 4 percent of the country outside of Hollywood had no religious affiliation, 45 percent of Hollywood was areligious. While 76 percent of Americans believed that homosexual acts were wrong, only 20 percent of Hollywood did; while 59 percent of the American public was pro-choice, 97 percent of Hollywood was. As Schiffer stated, “We’re talking about those who by self-selection and ambition run the institutions of popular culture—in contrast to a traditional cultural elite defined by erudition, wisdom, and taste.

Calling you a racist and sexist, a bigot and a homophobe, gives them a sense of satisfaction with their status in the universe, even if they never help a single individual human being. This is a bully tactic. When someone calls you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because you happen to disagree with them about tax policy or same-sex marriage or abortion, that’s bullying. When someone slanders you because you happen to disagree with them about global warming or the government shutdown, that’s bullying. When someone labels you a bad human being because they disagree with you, they are bullying you. They are attacking your character without justification. That’s nasty. In fact, it makes them nasty.

If Obama learned one thing from FDR, it was that every socialist needs his foot soldiers. And what better place to get them than the unions?

greatest films ever made originate largely in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s—a period when Hollywood worked under the “heavy hand” of the Hays Production Code.

No wonder the left seeks to avoid political debate at all costs. Why bother? Members of the left are not interested in having a debate about policy. They are not interested in debating what is right or wrong for the country. They are interested in debating you personally. They are interested in castigating you as a nasty human being because you happen to disagree.

After nearly half a century, it’s easy to forget that the Hays Code was not some outside limitation imposed by the government. It was a content standard imposed by motion picture companies voluntarily.

People on the left are taught from childhood that they are better than conservatives – it makes them feel good to hate conservatives. And that hatred is justified because, after all, conservatives are bigots.

At my own beloved UCLA the numbers are just as frightening. There are thirty-one English professors with registered party affiliation. Twenty-nine of them are affiliated with the Democratic party, the Green party, or another leftist political party. Out of thirteen journalism professors with registered affiliation, twelve are affiliated with leftist parties. Fifty-three out of fifty-six history professors are affiliated with leftist parties. Sixteen out of seventeen political science professors are affiliated with leftist parties. Thirty-one of thirty-three women’s studies professors are affiliated with leftist parties.

We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.

The Hays Code stated: “When right standards are consistently presented, the motion picture exercises the most powerful influences. It builds character, develops right ideals, inculcates correct principles, and all this in attractive story form. If motion pictures consistently hold up for admiration high types of characters and present stories that will affect lives for the better, they can become the most powerful force for the improvement of mankind.

1. Why do you think today’s young people are so jaded? Do you feel that the “live and let live” culture has corrupted our moral system? Why do you think American society rejected traditional moral values—the values our founders believed were necessary for our national survival—in favor of moral relativism? How much do you feel our cultural institutions—Hollywood, academia, public schools, and the mass media—are complicit in lowering societal standards?

To take another example, with regard to healthcare, the left suggests that their entire goal is to make healthcare available to everyone. But they don’t mandate that a certain percentage of the population go to medical school. That’s because in order for government to guarantee a product’s availability, the government must either hire workers or force workers to get into a given industry. The government hiring workers would require paying money for doctors – and the left argues that doctors already make too much money. And the left won’t argue openly for what they would prefer: forcing people to practice medicine for patients deemed worthy by the government. Unless you are willing to force people using the law to go to medical school, you cannot have a successful universal healthcare system. That’s what they’re finding out in Britain, Canada, and Israel – all countries in which private medicine is on the rise, legally or illegally, outside government auspices.

There are almost invariably unbridgeable inconsistencies in the left’s publicly stated positions that are at war with their actual fundamental principles. Your goal is to make the left admit once and for all what they believe about policy by exposing those inconsistencies.

Benjamin Franklin placed free speech at the center of American life and American philosophy some five decades before the Constitution was written: Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. . . . An evil magistrate intrusted with power to punish for words, would be armed with a weapon the most destructive and terrible. Under pretence of pruning off the exuberant branches, he would be apt to destroy the tree.

I liked George W. Bush, but his second term was a disaster area. So was much of his first term. I don’t feel the necessity to defend his Iran policy, because it was terrible. Period. Ronald Reagan was not a god. He himself would have said that. Don’t follow people. Follow principle.

That virtue took the form of courage—willingness to sacrifice life, fortune, and sacred honor in pursuit of defending the rights necessary to pursue virtue itself. That virtue took the form of temperance—no better founding document has ever been penned than the Constitution of the United States, the product of compromise. That virtue took the form of prudence—the practical wisdom of The Federalist Papers has not yet been surpassed in political thought. And that virtue took the form of justice—the rule of law, not of men, and the creation of a system where each receives his due.

The fact that no military was deployed to the hot zone during the seven-hour attack was unthinkable. Military assets were just hours away in Italy. Nordstrom testified, “The ferocity and intensity of the attack was nothing that we had seen in Libya, or that I had seen in my time in the Diplomatic Security Service.”87 Yet aside from that one team from Tripoli, which included Glenn Doherty, there was no show of force from outside Benghazi. A special ops whistle-blower told Fox News that the military had a team ready to scramble from Croatia. That would have taken some four to six hours. The attack lasted for seven hours.88

Here’s what presidential candidate Mitt Romney said about Barack Obama: Barack Obama is not a very good President. He said Barack Obama doesn’t do a very good job on the economy; he said that Obama’s foreign policy has a lot of holes in it; he said Obama has done a pretty poor job across the board of working in bipartisan fashion. But, Romney added, Obama’s a good guy. He’s a good family man, a good husband, a man who believes in the basic principles espoused by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He is not someone you should be afraid of in any way. Essentially, Romney’s campaign slogan was this: “Obama: Good Guy, Bad President.

from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible for directly implementing Obamacare and therefore subject to HHS oversight. • At virtually the same time, Republican lawmakers send a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking why the EPA has forced conservative groups to pay fees for Freedom

According to the 2010 census, just 24 percent of the American population is under age 18, compared with 39.4 percent that is 45 and older. America is aging, and aging quickly. And what of the young? Their chief concerns these days are legalization of marijuana, state-sponsored same-sex marriage and provision of birth control. If we think the demographics and economics of the country look bad now, wait until America relies on a generation of overprivileged, underachieving Americans convinced of their own moral rectitude based on a puerile libertarianism freed of libertarianism’s consequences. Sex and drugs have replaced building for the future; abortion and the welfare state have replaced consequences.

SHAPIRO: This is astonishing. MORGAN: What’s astonishing? SHAPIRO: What’s astonishing about it is for weeks now, you have been saying that anybody who disagrees with your position is absurd, idiotic, and doesn’t care about the dead kids in Sandy Hook. And then when I say that it’s a bullying tactic, you turn around and that say I’m bullying you for saying that. It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous.

You can try to hide from the attacks of the left; you can run away from them, attempt to ignore them, pretend that the left has reached some sort of quasi-consensus in which they live and let live. That will last until the protesters are outside your business, the government regulators are outside your house, or the administrators are inside your child’s classroom. Then you’ll realize that while you were willing to let live, the left simply wasn’t.

And here’s what Barack Obama and his surrogates said about Mitt Romney: Mitt Romney is the worst guy since Mussolini. Mitt Romney is the guy who straps dogs to the top of cars. Mitt Romney is the kind of guy who wants to “put y’all back in chains.” Mitt Romney is leading a “war on women” and, in fact, has compiled a binder full of women that he can then use to prosecute his war. Mitt Romney is the type of guy who would specifically fire an employee so that five years later his wife would die of cancer thanks to lack of health insurance. Mitt Romney would take his money and put it in an overseas bank account specifically to deprive the American people of money. The Obama campaign slogan: “Romney: Rich, Sexist, Racist Jackass.

The Institutional Takeover The leftist bullies have taken over the major institutions of the United States. The university system has been monopolized by a group of folks who believe that it’s no longer worthwhile debating the evidence on tax rates, or whether the Laffer curve is right, or whether Keynesian policies actually promote economic growth. They don’t want to debate those issues. What they want to teach instead is that is you are personally ignorant, bigoted, corrupt, and mean if you disagree with them. Their opinions are not opinions; they are fact. This is the hallmark of being stuck inside a bubble. The people who occupy the professoriate have not had to work a real job – a job with real-world consequences -- in over 30 years. They’ve lived on a campus where everyone agrees with them, convincing them that their beliefs are universally-held. Anyone who disagrees is a “flat earther.” Anyone who disagrees is a monster. You are a monster.