Jordan Peterson Quotes - 39 quotes

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Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson is a renowned clinical psychologist, author, and media commentator. He was born on June 12, 1962, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He earned his bachelor’s degrees in political science and psychology from the University of Alberta and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill Unive... show more

quote icon I think the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it’s not because white people aren’t privileged. Ya know, we have all sorts of privileges. Most people have privileges of all sorts and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them I would say. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group… There is absolutely nothing that is more racist than that. It’s absolutely abhorrent.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon I made a case fairly consistently that most people find the meaning that sustains them through the vicissitudes of life not in happiness but in responsibility, and that would bring everyone to a halt...it would always make the whole theater silent it's like 'oh i never thought of that connection'.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Do not claim divine motivation for self-serving behavior.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Pride means something like stubborn refusal to change when evidence of error is accruing.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon What kind of world is this, where such things can happen? What kind of God would make such a place?

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon A huge problem on the social media side is that we put undue access to status in the hands of people who will misuse accusations to garner attention.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon “That’s a very tiny of proportion of men. A huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men; most people in prison are men; most people who are on the street are men; most victims of violent crime are men; most people who commit suicide are men; most people who die in wars are men; people who do worse in school are men.” “[W]here’s the dominance here, precisely? What you’re doing is you’re taking a tiny substrata of hyper-successful men and using that to represent the entire structure of Western society. There’s nothing about that that’s vaguely appropriate.”

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Our culture confuses men's desire for achievement and competence with the patriarchal desire for tyrannical power. And that's a big mistake

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon The Left's attempt to define western civilization as "purely" a "tyrannical patriarchy," Peterson goes on to argue, is irrational and unjust. Acknowledging that the West has its corruptions and imperfections, some of which are "patriarchal," is far different than trying to cast the entire civilization as fundamentally flawed, which Peterson contends feminists like Lewis are consistently attempting to do. When Lewis says she doesn't describe it as that, he asks her then why she insists on reductively labeling the West as "a patriarchy."

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon They're hungry for a discussion of the relationship between responsibility and meaning, and we haven't had that discussion in our culture for 50 years. We've concentrated on rights and privileges, freedom and impulsive pleasure. Those are all useful in their place, but they're shallow, and that's not good because if people are moored shallowly, then storms wreck them...

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Men are more often alcoholic and antisocial. Women are more likely to have anxiety disorders.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Dostoevsky expresses his doubts about the propriety of Being through the character of Ivan who, if you remember, is the articulate, handsome, sophisticated brother (and greatest adversary) of the monastic novitiate, Alyosha. "It's not God I don't accept. Understand this," says Ivan. "I do not accept the world that He created, this world of God's, and cannot agree with it." Ivan tells Alyosha a story about a small girl whose parents punished her by locking her in a freezing outhouse overnight (a story Dostoevsky culled from a newspaper of the time). "Can you just see those two snoozing away while their daughter was crying all night?" says Ivan. "And imagine this little child: unable to understand what was happening to her, beating her frozen little chest and crying meek little tears, begging 'gentle Jesus' to get her out of that horrible place!...Alyosha: if you were somehow promised that the world could finally have complete and total peace-but only on the condition that you tortured one little child to death-say, that girl who was freezing in the outhouse...Would you do it?" Alyosha demurs, "No, I would not," he says softly. He would not do what God seems to freely allow.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon The right hemisphere appears integrally involved in the initial stages of analysis of the unexpected or novel—and its a priori hypothesis is always this: this (unknown) place, this unfamiliar space, this unexplored territory is dangerous, and therefore partakes in the properties of all other known dangerous places and territories, and all those that remain unknown, as well . This form of information processing—“a” is “b”—is metaphor; generation of metaphor (key to the construction of narratives—dreams, dramas, stories and myth) might well be regarded as the first stage of hypothesis construction.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Pursue what is meaningful (Not what is expedient).

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Whatever happens as a consequence of telling the truth is the best thing that can happen. It doesn't really matter how it looks to you at the moment, or maybe even across the years.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon You want to be in a relationship with someone you can spar with, partly because you have hard problems to solve. If the person you are with is not willing to put forward their opinion, then you only have half the cognitive power that you would otherwise have. The hope is that you find someone who is interestingly different from you, but not so different that you cannot communicate. Hopefully, they have the ability and will to express their opinion because that keeps your interest heightened.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon First stop lying, then start speaking the truth.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon One of the things that struck me as near miraculous about music, especially in a rather nihilistic and atheistic society, is that it really does fill the void that was left by the death of God. And it's partly because you cannot rationally critique music. It speaks to you, it speaks of meaning, and no matter what you say about it, no matter how cynical you are, you cannot put a crowbar underneath that and lift it up and toss it aside.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Competence can step in where popularity cannot go.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon You might think, "Well, compassion is a virtue." Yes, it's a virtue, but any uni-dimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice, because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs while she eats you because you got in the way.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon The future is the place of all potential monsters.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon It seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students' future earnings and they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that thought is internalized speech. And that the dialectical process that constitutes critical thinking is internalized speech.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon The quality of our thoughts is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon The truth is something that burns—it burns off deadwood, and people don't like having their deadwood burnt off, often because they're 95% deadwood.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon The question is: In these societies, cross-culturally, who is elevated to the status of elder? And you might say 'Well, it's the roughest, toughest, most dominant chimp, oppressive, patriarchal male.' and that actually happens to not be the case at all. And so what you do see is that productive males who are older, they have to be productive, who are simultaneously generous and reciprocal, and are recognized as such in their communities, hold the status of authority and help govern properly. And so we could say that there's no evidence whatsoever on the scientific or anthropological front that the doctrine that the prime human motivation for the construction of social relations is power. And I would add to that further that if you think that power is the fundamental motivation of humankind, that is a confession not an observation. And so look out for people who make that claim because they're making that claim to justify to themselves their own use of psychopathic and narcissistic social mediation strategies.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon I've tried to maintain a relatively balanced view of the excesses on both sides of the political spectrum, but one thing I have clearly experienced repeatedly is that the Left will shun and exclude to a degree that's almost unknown on the Right. I've never had anyone on the Right, that I've talked to, refuse to talk to a hypothetical guest, for example. And I've had people on the Left, they just do that all the time.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon And I think maybe among agreeable people, if you don't go along with the agreeable game you are much more likely to be categorized as a predator.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Part of the reason that politicians have come to believe that the public is stupid and has no attention span is that television had a 30-second attention span. So you had to assume your audience remembered nothing, knew nothing, and could flip out to a different channel at any moment. Plus the bandwidth was insanely expensive. Now all that is gone. I think that will be a revolution in political discourse.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon THEN THERE IS SOME HOPE IN THAT MESSAGE, RIGHT? BECAUSE YOU THINK IF YOU JUST ACCEPTED PEOPLE THE WAY THEY ARE THEY WOULD BE HAPPY U.S. NO THEY WOULDN'T BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOTHING TO SHOOT FOR, PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOTHING TO SHOOT FOR ARE NOT HAPPY, HAPPY IS A CONSEQUENCE OF MOVING TOWARDS SOMETHING THAT YOU ARE AIMING FOR. SO, NO AIM, NO HAPPINESS, THAT IS ANOTHER GOOD THING FOR YOUNG PEOPLE TO KNOW IS TO HAVE A GOAL. TECHNICALLY, TECHNICALLY HAPPINESS OCCURS WHEN YOU SEE YOURSELF MOVING TOWARD A VALUED GOAL, THAT IS HOW IT WORKS NEUROPSYCH LOGICALLY, CHEMICALLY. SO, THE HIGHER YOUR GOAL, THE HIGHER YOUR POSSIBILITY FOR HAPPINESS EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE TO SUFFER FROM A DISTANCE.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon There's a line in the old testament; the fear of god is the begining of wisdom. And I think it's more like that, it's not that I'm courageous, it's that I'm afraid of the right things.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Success breeds success and failure breeds failure and its not necessary linear. I noticed that it is similar to joker's theory that one good day can lift you to heavens and one bad day will crush to the ground. The chance is such a big factor with a capability to change order into chaos. You can never be certain of unknown variables and good enough is the basic peak that you can achieve.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Most of the time we are good because we are living in comfortable lives but when desperate time struck you, you are compelled to go the wrong way. If you are well off, chances are tat you will try to be good but struggles you into a cynical person and that is where, the greatest test of morality will come or if you are willing enough to upheld your principles. This is something I am not proud to say that i am enduring now but this shall pass too, attitude might help me to survive. How will you overcome the suffering of life.By being better than the yesterday.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon ...established its you know zone of and Utopia downtown it's like well it'll be just like the Summer of Love which by the way ended very badly and that was fine until the lights went off at night and the criminals came to play and you think well they're just victims of an oppressive social organizations like that'll be a real good thing to tell them when they break into your house.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Fear of the unknown and unexplored territory or you hit a failure then you freeze. then your next option s to come back to a comfortable zone by any means. I am trying to reach there.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon People defend their beliefs so they don't have to venture into the unknown which will bring anxiety and hyper stress ad they need to defend to keep their mental balance.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon Why should your rights to freedom of speech Trump a trans person's right not to be offended because in order to be able to think you have to risk being offensive I mean look at the conversation we're having right now you know like you're certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth why should you have the right to do that it's being rather uncomfortable well I'm I'm very glad I put you well I'm you get my point as like you're you're doing what you should do which is digging a bit to see what the hell's going on saying that is what you should do but you're exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me and that's fine I think more power to as far as I'm concerned so you haven't stopped that and I'm just right I'm just trying to work that out I mean ha gotcha you have caught me you have caught me.

- Jordan Peterson

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quote icon I write about myself so that my emotions don't get stuck in the past. In the future, you will feel like a part of your soul is stuck in the past and that makes it tough to move on. It also helps me to explain myself that what is my true persona or if i am lying to myself. Who i am depends upon how deep i dig and what entanglements have been lingering inside my mind.

- Jordan Peterson

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