Jordan Peterson quotes

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.

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.

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!

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.

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.

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

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.

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

Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.

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?

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.

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.'

'Happiness' is a pointless goal.

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.

Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

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.

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

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.

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.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Power is competence.

If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

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'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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The multiplication force of technology on cognitive differences is massive.

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.

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.

It's not just human nature to associate in tribes. It's deeper than that.

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.

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.