Dinesh D'Souza: Trending quotes

“Virtue has great power, but not if it is imposed – only when it is chosen.”

Dinesh D'Souza

The Washington Post, , quoted in * 2003-07-08 Cal Thomas Theological dictators Townhall.com 2019-09-06 https://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2003/07/08/theological-dictators-n752580

“I feel a bit like the mosquito at the nudist colony—I'm just not sure where to begin!”

Dinesh D'Souza

"Does God Exist?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fzde_QN4fE&feature=youtu.be&t=19m40s — Dinesh D'Souza and Dan Barker debate at Prestonwood Christian Academy, Plano, TX (November 19, 2009)
Debates
Context: Dan has raised so many points... I feel a bit like the mosquito at the nudist colony—I'm just not sure where to begin!

Feeling

“America is the greatest, freest, and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Books, What's So Great About America (2003), Ch. 6: America the Beautiful

World , Hope , Country

“There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Letters to a Young Conservative

Death , Penalty , Personality

“Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Books, What's So Great about Christianity (2007), Ch. 3
Source: What's So Great About Christianity
Context: Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views.

Freedom

“This is our turn at the wheel, and history will judge us based on how we handle it. Decline is a choice, but so is liberty.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Books, America: Imagine a World without Her (2014), Ch. 16

History

“As an immigrant, I am constantly surprised by how much I hear racism talked about and how little I actually see it. (Even fewer are the incidents in which I have experienced it directly.)”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Books, What's So Great About America (2003), Ch. 4: The Reparations Fallacy

“If I had remained in India, I would probably have lived my whole life within a five-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married a woman of my identical religious and socioeconomic background. I would almost certainly have become a medical doctor, or an engineer, or a computer programmer. I would have socialized entirely within my ethnic community. I would have a whole set of opinions that could be predicted in advance; indeed, they would not be very different from what my father believed, or his father before him. In sum, my destiny would to a large degree have been given to me… The typical American could come to India, live for 40 years, and take Indian citizenship. But he could not 'become Indian'. He wouldn't see himself that way, nor would most Indians see him that way. In America, by contrast, hundreds of millions have come from far-flung shores and over time they, or at least their children, have in a profound and full sense 'become American'.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Articles, 10 Things to Celebrate: Why I'm an Anti-Anti-American (June 2003)

Life , Children , Way , Communication

“America is the most magnanimous of all imperial powers that have ever existed.”

Dinesh D'Souza

"What's So Great about America" http://www.hoover.org/research/whats-so-great-about-america, Hoover Digest (30 July 2002).

“America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being. That human being—confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future oriented—is a vast improvement over the wretched, servile, fatalistic, and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced, and that Islamic societies produce now.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Books, What's So Great About America (2003), Ch. 6: America the Beautiful

Confidence , Future

“The [George W. ] Bush administration and the conservatives must stop promoting American popular culture because it is producing a blowback of Muslim rage. With a few exceptions, the right should not bother to defend American movies, music, and television. From the point of view of traditional values, they are indefensible. Moreover, why should the right stand up for the left's debased values? Why should our people defend their America? Rather, American conservatives should join the Muslims and others in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced by liberal values.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Introduction, p. 26
Books, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left And its Responsibility for 9, 11 (2007)

People , Music , Rage

“Did America steal the country from the Native Americans? Much of this critique focuses on Columbus and the actions of the Spanish conquistadors. But Columbus never even landed in America. And the actions of the Spanish, that was 150 years before America.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Documentary films, America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014)

Country

“The main contemporary obstacle facing African Americans is neither white racism, as many liberals claim, nor black genetic deficiency, as Charles Murray and others imply. Rather it involves destructive and pathological cultural patterns of behavior: excessive reliance on government, conspiratorial paranoia about racism, a resistance to academic achievement as "acting white," a celebration of the criminal and outlaw as authentically black, and the normalization of illegitimacy and dependency.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Books, The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 1

Behavior , Dependency

“Slavery existed all over the world. The Egyptians had slaves. The Chinese had slaves. The Africans did. American Indians had slaves long before Columbus. And tragically, slavery continues today in many countries. What's uniquely Western is the abolition of slavery. And what's uniquely American is the fighting of a great war to end it.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Documentary films, America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014)

War , World , Fight , Country

“We should love our country not just because it is ours, but also because it is good. America is far from perfect, and there is lots of room for improvement. In spite of its flaws, however, American life as it is lived today is the best life that our world has to offer. Ultimately America is worthy of our love and sacrifice because, more than any other society, it makes possible the good life, and the life that is good.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Articles, 10 Things to Celebrate: Why I'm an Anti-Anti-American (June 2003)

Love , Life , World , Perfection

“Better off? The point is illustrated by the great African American boxer Muhammad Ali. In the early 1970s Muhammad Ali fought for the heavyweight title against George Foreman. The fight was held in the African nation of Zaire; it was insensitively called the "rumble in the jungle." Ali won the fight, and upon returning to the United States, he was asked by a reporter, "Champ, what did you think of Africa?" Ali replied, "Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!" There is a characteristic mischievous pungency to Ali's remark, yet it also expresses a widely held sentiment. Ali recognizes that for all the horror of slavery, it was the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western freedom. The slaves were not better off—the boat Ali refers to brought the slaves through a horrific Middle Passage to a life of painful servitude—yet their descendants today, even if they won't admit it, are better off. Ali was honest enough to admit it.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Books, America: Imagine a World without Her (2014), Ch. 8. Most likely a misattribution. A Newsweek article at the time of the match attributed the quote "Thank God our grandpappies caught that boat!" to George Foreman's manager Dick Sadler. "It Takes a Heap of Salongo", Newsweek (September 23, 1974), p. 72.

Life , God , Pain , Thinking

“The worst decay in the two-parent black family unit seems to have occurred not during slavery or as a result of slavery, but much later and for different reasons. Nor is there any evidence that as a consequence of slavery, blacks condoned illegitimacy as acceptable within the community. For the decline and fragility of the contemporary black family, the institution of slavery bears only a minor responsibility.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Books, The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 3: An American Dilemma

Family , Communication , Parent

“What the immigrant cannot help noticing is that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, "People Like Us", which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with a view to embarrassing the Reagan administration. But by the testimony of former Soviet leaders, it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans have television sets and microwave ovens and cars. They arrived at the same perception of America that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been unsuccessfully trying to move to the United States for nearly a decade. Finally I asked him, "Why are you so eager to come to America?"”

Dinesh D'Souza

He replied, "Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat."
Source: Books, What's So Great About America (2003), Ch. 3: Becoming American

People , Cars , Help , Country

“If biological differences do exist, they cannot be wished away. However unpopular the investigation, we have to take the possibility of natural differences seriously. What is at stake is nothing less than the foundation of contemporary liberalism.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Source: Books, The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 11

Nature

“Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.”

Dinesh D'Souza

Article http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1121/p09s01-coop.html for The Christian Science Monitor (21 November 2006).

Religion , History