Top 40 Amanda Montell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.”

— Amanda Montell

2. “1945, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that language is human beings’ element just as “water is the element of fish.”

— Amanda Montell

3. “That’s because language doesn’t work to manipulate people into believing things they don’t want to believe; instead, it gives them license to believe ideas they’re already open.”

— Amanda Montell

4. “This makes sense, because in every corner of life, business and otherwise, when you can tell deep down that something is ethically wrong but are having trouble pinpointing why, language is a good place to look for evidence.”

— Amanda Montell

5. “With words, we breathe reality into being.”

— Amanda Montell

6. “Sociologists also say that higher education and training in the scientific method generally make people less gullible. And for better or for worse, so does being in a bad mood. In several experiments, researchers found that when someone is in a good mood, they become more innocent and unsuspecting, while feeling grumpy makes one better at sensing deception. Which has to be the most curmudgeonly superpower I’ve ever heard.”

— Amanda Montell

7. “In this way, it’s not desperation or mental illness that consistently suckers people into exploitative groups – instead, it’s an overabundance of optimism.”

— Amanda Montell

8. “Roses are red Money is green The American Dream Is a pyramid scheme.”

— Amanda Montell

9. “A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.”

— Amanda Montell

10. “Unlike the cults of the ’70s, we don’t even have to leave the house for a charismatic figure to take hold of us. With contemporary cults, the barrier to entry if the simple frisson of tapping Follow.”

— Amanda Montell

11. “I think the golden rule for men should be: If you’re a man, don’t say anything to a woman on the street that you wouldn’t want a man saying to you in prison.”

— Amanda Montell

12. “Feeling so disoriented that you doubt the very language you’ve been speaking your whole life can make you commit even more strongly to a charismatic leader who promises to show you the way.”

— Amanda Montell

13. “It’s not that smart people aren’t capable of believing in cultish things; instead, says Shermer, it’s that smart people are better at “defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

— Amanda Montell

14. “This is what the most cunning cultish leaders do: Instead of sticking to one unchanging lexis to represent a unified doctrine, they customize their language according to the individual in front of them.”

— Amanda Montell

15. “Language change is always reflective of social change, and over the decades, as our sources, of connections and existential purpose has shifted due to the phenomena like social media, increased globalization, and withdrawal from traditional religion we’ve seen the rise of more alternative subgroups-some dangerous, some not so much. “Cult” has evolved to describe them all.”

— Amanda Montell

16. “Totalitarian leaders can’t hope to gain or maintain power without using language to till a psychological schism between their followers and everyone else.”

— Amanda Montell

17. “There’s a reason most religions encourage prayer: Language strengthens beliefs.”

— Amanda Montell

18. “The term “gaslight” originates from a 1938 British play of the same name, in which an abusive husband convinces his wife she’s gone mad. He does this in part by dimming the gaslights in their house and insisting that she’s delusional every time she points out the change.”

— Amanda Montell

19. “What’s new is that in this internet-ruled age, when a guru can be godless, when the barrier to entry is as low as a double-tap, and when folks who hold alternative beliefs are able to find one another more easily than ever, it only makes sense that secular cults – from obsessed workout studios to start-ups that put the “cult” in “company culture” – would start sprouting like dandelions. For good or for ill, there is now a cult for everyone.”

— Amanda Montell

20. “Words like mompreneur, SHE-EO, and girl boss illuminate the notion that entrepreneur and CEO are not actually gender-neutral teens but are tacitly coded as male. The suggest that when a woman endeavors in business, we can’t help but to cutesy-fy her title.”

— Amanda Montell

21. “Without language, there are no “cults”.”

— Amanda Montell

22. “One of the burdens of being a woman is the imperative to be nice.”

— Amanda Montell

23. “According to the Corpus of Historical American English, which contains a massive four hundred million words from the 1810s to the 2000s, most people didn’t start using the word gender to describe human beings until the 1980s.”

— Amanda Montell

24. “The nimble direct sales industry always finds a way to reinvent itself – the capitalist cockroach that just won’t stop reincarnating.”

— Amanda Montell

25. “The diagram of QAnon and New Agers looks more circular every day.”

— Amanda Montell

26. “The majority leave before things get deadly, but the reasons some don’t might also sound familiar. They’re the same reasons you might put off a necessary breakup: denial, listlessness, social stresses, fear they might seek revenge, lack of money, lack of outside support, doubt that you’ll be able to find something better, and the sheer hope that your current situation will improve – go back to how it was at the start – if only you hold on a few more months, commit a fraction more.”

— Amanda Montell

27. “It doesn’t take someone broken or disturbed to crave that structure. Again, we’re wired to. And what we often overlook is that the material with which that scaffolding is built, the very material that fabricates our reality, is language.”

— Amanda Montell

28. “All kinds of research points to the idea that humans are social and spiritual by design.”

— Amanda Montell

29. “Simply put, slurs go out of style at the same time the underlying belief in them does.”

— Amanda Montell

30. “In some instances, the process of pejoration rebrands a feminine word as an insult not for women but for men. Take the words buddy and sissy: Today, we might use sissy to describe a weak or overly effeminate man, while buddy is a synonym for a close pal. We don’t think of these words as being related, but in the beginning, buddy and sissy were abbreviations of the words brother and sister.”

— Amanda Montell

31. “In the end, MLMs aren’t in the business of selling start-up ventures to entrepreneurs. Like most destructive “cults,” they’re in the business of selling the transcendent promise of something that doesn’t actually exist. And their commodity isn’t merchandise, it’s rhetoric.”

— Amanda Montell

32. “That means questioning the words we speak every day, as well as the contexts in which we use them – because without realizing it, something as simple as an address term or curse word might be reinforcing a power structure that we ultimately don’t agree with.”

— Amanda Montell

33. “Amway labels any attitudes or utterances they don’t like “stinkin’ thinkin’.”

— Amanda Montell

34. “One of the sneakiest ways these biases show up is that in our language, in our culture, maleness is seen as the default.”

— Amanda Montell

35. “Language is a leader’s charisma. It’s what empowers them to create a mini universe – a system of values and truths – and then compel their followers to heed its rules.”

— Amanda Montell

36. “I like Burton’s way of looking at it, which is less about what religions are and more about what religions do, which is to provide the following four things: meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual.”

— Amanda Montell

37. “Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said.”

— Amanda Montell

38. “Tuning in to the rhetoric these communities use, and how its influence works for both good and not so good, can help us participate, however we choose, with clearer eyes.”

— Amanda Montell

39. “But to me, the most compelling argument is that young women innovate because they see language as a tool to assert their power in a culture that doesn’t give them a lot of ways to do that.”

— Amanda Montell

40. “I don’t think the world would benefit from us all refusing to believe or participate in things. Too much wariness spoils the most enchanting parts of being human. I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t let our guards down for a few moments to engage in a group chant or mantra. If everyone feared the alternative to the point that they never took even small leaps of faith for the sake of connection and meaning, how lonely would that be?”

— Amanda Montell

41. “Much religious language ‘performs’ rather than ‘informs’.”

— Amanda Montell

42. “The way to get to that world starts not with teaching women how to protect themselves from harm but with teaching men, ideally from very early on, that the whole world does not belong to them. When men are itty bitty boys, we, as their parents and teachers, have to dismantle our culture’s ideas of masculinity as we know them, at every turn.”

— Amanda Montell

43. “Objectively, made-up metaphysical interpretations of “quantum fields” and “upgrading your DNA” are just as irrational as ghosts and alien visitations; but the fact that they’re associated with a demographic of social media–savvy young people with college degrees makes them seem more acceptable.”

— Amanda Montell