Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Jordan Peterson
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
When you start to realise how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.
Men and women aren't the same. And they won't be the same. That doesn't mean that they can't be treated fairly.
Power is competence.
If you're not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you're going to be punished for them, then what's your motivation to continue?
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
Part of the core information that I've been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don't play racial, ethnic, and gender identity games. The Left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let's say, and the Right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they're equally dangerous.
Abortion is clearly wrong.
You can think of the entire Internet as a place where ideas embodied in cyberspace are having a war, and it's not much different than the war of gods in heaven, which has been taking place since there's been human beings.
You may say, 'Well, dragons don't exist.' It's, like, yes they do - the category 'predator' and the category 'dragon' are the same category. It absolutely exists. It's a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.
I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.
Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.
The masculine spirit is under assault. It's obvious.
I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don't know exactly what's going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what's inside of them without being part of them.
It's not just human nature to associate in tribes. It's deeper than that.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.
The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.
I could hardly sit through 'Frozen.' There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.
'Happiness' is a pointless goal.
You can't have a value structure without a hierarchy. They're the same thing because a value structure means one thing takes precedence over another.
I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.
Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don't mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That's not power. That's just corruption.
It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.
There's a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.
It's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It's not in happiness. It's not in impulsive pleasure.
It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.
Don't lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.
Don't be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.
The most propagandistic element of 'Frozen' was the transformation of the prince at the beginning of the story, who was a perfectly good guy, into a villain with no character development whatsoever about three-quarters of the way to the ending.
Free speech is not just another value. It's the foundation of Western civilization.
Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.
We're so immaturely cynical as a culture. We're not wise enough to look at an institution like marriage and to really things about what it means and what it signifies. It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they're stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another.
To master a new technology, you have to play with it.
Become aware of your own insufficiency.
It's a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they're almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.
One of the things I've told men over and over and over and over is if you're being rejected by all the women that you approach, it's not the women!
It's very hard to find your own words - and you don't actually exist until you have your own words.
The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.
I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.
The multiplication force of technology on cognitive differences is massive.
You can say, 'Well, isn't it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine' - well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn't matter, because that is how it's represented. It's been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can't change it. It's not possible. This is underneath everything.
I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.
Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth... That's the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.
The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.
The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don't like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they're 95 percent dead wood.
The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.
I have something in common with Nazis in that I am opposed to the radical Left. And when you oppose the radical Left, you end up being a part of a much larger group that includes Nazis in it.
Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.
If you're talking to a man who wouldn't fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you're talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.
If you want to occupy the C-suite or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that, and they think, 'No.'
There were some great clinicians in the 20th century - great men. Freud was a genius; Jung was a genius, Carl Rogers was a genius - there's a half-dozen psychologists of the 1950s and humanists of the 1960s.
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
If you don't stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.
You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.
Don't compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.
No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.
Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?
To me, ideology is corrupt; it's a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you're an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you're religious, there's a mystery left there.
You can't go backward in life.
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