Top 100 Ben Shapiro Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

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

— Ben Shapiro

52. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

53. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

54. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

55. “Instead, morality must be boiled down to mere competition of interests, and the desire of human beings to avoid suffering and untimely death. In a state of nature, “nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice.”5 If moral relativism began anywhere, it began in Hobbes.”

— Ben Shapiro

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

— Ben Shapiro

57. “Concerned about the societal fallout from sexual promiscuity? Mind your own business. Worried about the rise of single motherhood? Mind your own business. Upset about an epidemic of young people seemingly willing to trade the responsibilities of adulthood for an infantilized freedom? Mind your own business.”

— Ben Shapiro

58. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

59. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

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

— Ben Shapiro

61. “The left consistently bullies those who disagree with them by claiming they’re sexist and “heteronormative.”

— Ben Shapiro

62. “So the next time they mention Bush, your reply should be, “WILLIAM MCKINLEY.” Bush has nothing to do with anything.”

— Ben Shapiro

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

— Ben Shapiro

64. “Students are taught to confess their “white privilege” – a key component of the intersectional theory undercutting traditional American notions of individual responsibility and rights.”

— Ben Shapiro

65. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

66. “Now, twenty years later, Candice Bergen, who played Murphy Brown, admitted Quayle was right – but at the time, Quayle was running for re-election, and so he had to be wrong.”

— Ben Shapiro

67. “We have the ability to treat everyone equally under law; we have the ability to create governments to protect individual rights. But we don’t have the ability to guarantee that even two kids the same age living on the same street will start from the same point; two children growing up in the same family don’t even start from the same point. We certainly don’t have the ability to ensure that everyone ends at the same point.”

— Ben Shapiro

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

— Ben Shapiro

69. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

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

— Ben Shapiro

71. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

72. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

73. “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?”

— Ben Shapiro

74. “But it’s because conservatives don’t think about how to win that they constantly lose.”

— Ben Shapiro

75. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

76. “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?”

— Ben Shapiro

77. “That’s how social standards work for the left: If you have the right politics, you can get away with anything. If you have the wrong ones, it’ll ignore its own hypocrisy to nail you to the wall.”

— Ben Shapiro

78. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

79. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

80. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

81. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

82. “The goal: to convince young people that while they aren’t overtly racist, they hold secret racist beliefs that can only be cleansed by embracing the leftist agenda.”

— Ben Shapiro

83. “Government cannot change the hearts of human beings – it cannot make them that which they are not.”

— Ben Shapiro

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

— Ben Shapiro

85. “All that will be left are polarized groups, seeking their own interests.”

— Ben Shapiro

86. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

87. “What, then, are the easily identifiable factors that lead to lower income mobility for black Americans? First, lack of fathers in the home: single motherhood is one of the most powerful predictors of intergenerational poverty.”

— Ben Shapiro

88. “Hypocrisy as humor pushes destruction of standards.”

— Ben Shapiro

89. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

90. “By ripping away the core components of Unionist government – delegated powers, checks and balances, and federalism – Disintegrationist government heightens the stakes of politics while reducing our common ground. It forces Americans to fight for the high ground of power, lest they be victimized by their opponents, who seek to dominate them using the mechanisms of arbitrary and unanswerable governmental coercion.”

— Ben Shapiro

91. “Thomas Jefferson didn’t write that the government was granted power to grant you happiness: it was there to protect your pursuit of happiness. The government existed to protect your rights, to prevent those rights from being infringed upon. The government was there to stop someone from stealing your horse, from butchering you in your sleep, from letting his cow graze on your land. At no point did Jefferson suggest that government could achieve happiness. None of the Founders thought it could.”

— Ben Shapiro

92. “The French Revolution, then, led not only to the rise of the nation-state and nationalism more broadly, it also opened the door to total war – the end of the distinction between civilian and military, and the willingness to weaponize an entire population toward the ends of governments.”

— Ben Shapiro

93. “What makes human beings unique, says Aristotle, is our capacity to reason, and to use that reason to investigate the nature of the world and our purpose in it:.”

— Ben Shapiro

94. “As a religious person, I do agree with much of Ayn Rand’s profoundly negative view of religion. Still, to minimize her contribution to philosophy is ridiculous. Her espousal of capitalism is incredibly important, today more than ever before. With taxes rising and government intervening in all sectors of life, her libertarian philosophy is required at least to balance the debate.”

— Ben Shapiro

95. “Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can’t provide happiness in and of itself.”

— Ben Shapiro

96. “From its very inception, the goal of higher education has been to challenge the authority structure under the banner of open-minded inquiry.”

— Ben Shapiro

97. “Authoritarians rarely recognize their own authoritarianism. To them, authoritarianism looks like simple virtue.”

— Ben Shapiro

98. “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.”

— Ben Shapiro

99. “Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful.”

— Ben Shapiro

100. “Finally, we must believe that we are pursuing true goals – not merely effective ones. Darwinian evolution leaves no room for the true; it only leaves room for the evolutionarily beneficial.”

— Ben Shapiro