Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Jordan Peterson - Page 2

That's another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it's as if things were coming together in my mind. It's like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it's it's like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

The right-wingers don't want to admit that for some people, there are no jobs; they think that conscientiousness in and of itself will do the trick.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There's just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

It's in the best interest of the radical left types - best psychological and strategic interest - to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.

My publication record puts me in the top 0.5 percent of psychologists.

Obviously, I'm no fan of the radical left.

I do believe that there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.

It's very difficult to regulate yourself, and if you learn to do that, well, it starts to spill over.

We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.

I've known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that's so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn't you take university courses throughout your entire life?

The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.

I'm a practical person. I'm not too bad a carpenter. I can renovate houses.

I've 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you're not naive after the first few thousand. I've helped people deal with things that most people can't imagine.

Kathleen Wynne and her band of radical-left cronies think they have a handle on what constitutes human identity and also what should constitute human morality. And I think that that's being pushed in a manner in schools that's completely reprehensible. It's not education, in my estimation. It's a form of indoctrination.

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

People have this capacity within them to set the world straight.

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

You can't just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can't incite people to crime. There's all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

I think Canadians are more interested in international events than Americans because it is such a small country, so politics affect it more.

I like working-class people, generally speaking.

All things considered, there's nobody better for children than parents.

If the standard transsexual person wants to be regarded as he or she, my sense is I'll address you according to the part that you appear to be playing.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

I don't really regard myself as a political figure.

Everything isn't political.

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that's true to some degree.

I'm always surprised when people respond positively to what I am saying, given its seriousnessness and strange nature.

It's not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It's inappropriate.

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

The book, '12 Rules For Life,' is a very serious book. There's elements of humor in it, but I'm trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it's necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there's hell to pay if you don't do that.

I've done some analysis of the biblical stories as part of my psychological work. I knew that I had more to do, and every time I've done it, it's been extremely valuable. It makes me a better teacher because I have a richer understanding of cultural history.

A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it's actually a being. 'Harry Potter''s a good example. So Harry's the hero, right. But he's tainted with evil. There's a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It's well balanced.

I suppose for a very long time I've been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

It isn't generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn't generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it's in the nature of hierarchy.

There's no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

Creative exploration [is] impossible, without (humble) acknowledgement of the unknown.

The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities.

Whether the gods are inside or outside makes very little difference to whether there are gods.