Top 40 George Lakoff Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

— George Lakoff

2. “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”

— George Lakoff

3. “Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you – the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends.”

— George Lakoff

4. “Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.”

— George Lakoff

5. “We know that someone who has channeled his anger into something constructive has not had a cow. How do we know these things?”

— George Lakoff

6. “If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.”

— George Lakoff

7. “In the Strict Father model, it is the duty of the strict father to protect his family above all else. By the Nation As Family metaphor, this implies that the major function of the government is, above all else, to protect the nation. That is why conservatives see the funding of the military as moral, while the funding of social programs is seen as immoral. There.”

— George Lakoff

8. “You can’t understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.”

— George Lakoff

9. “We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.”

— George Lakoff

10. “People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with.”

— George Lakoff

11. “Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth.”

— George Lakoff

12. “Progressives are constantly giving lists of facts. Facts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their moral importance.”

— George Lakoff

13. “It is a common folk theory of progressives that ‘the facts will set you free.’ If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don’t work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel.”

— George Lakoff

14. “Most conservatives are conservatives because they think they are morally correct.”

— George Lakoff

15. “Not surprisingly, the social reality defined by a culture affects its conception of physical reality. What is real for an individual as a member of a culture is a product both of his social reality and of the way in which that shapes his experience of the physical world. Since.”

— George Lakoff

16. “Patriotism is about improving the lives of one’s fellow citizens and improving one’s country’s contribution to the world. In the conservative moral hierarchy, our country is taken as simply better than other countries. This is jingoism, not true patriotism, which rests on progressive values.”

— George Lakoff

17. “For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.”

— George Lakoff

18. “Discrimination is a denial of freedom.”

— George Lakoff

19. “There is no Chomskyan person, for whom language is pure syntax, pure form insulated from and independent of all meaning, context, perception, emotion, memory, attention, action, and the dynamic nature of communication. Moreover, human language is not a totally genetic innovation. Rather, central aspects of language arise evolutionarily from sensory, motor, and other neural systems that are present in “lower” animals.”

— George Lakoff

20. “Deeply embedded in conservative and liberal politics are different models of the family. Conservatism, as we shall see, is based on a Strict Father model, while liberalism is centered around a Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give rise to different moral systems and different discourse forms, that is, different choices of words and different modes of reasoning. Once.”

— George Lakoff

21. “What is taxation? Taxation is what you pay to live in a civilized society- what you pay to have democracy and opportunity.”

— George Lakoff

22. “When you think you just lack words, what you really lack are ideas. Ideas come in the form of frames. When the frames are there, the words come readily.”

— George Lakoff

23. “New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.”

— George Lakoff

24. “The most important claim we have made so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical.”

— George Lakoff

25. “Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality.”

— George Lakoff

26. “There is no such thing as a self-made man. Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money.”

— George Lakoff

27. “One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.”

— George Lakoff

28. “As a consequence, it should be true that if you just get the facts out to people, they will reason to the right conclusion. And so year after year, decade after decade, liberals keep telling facts to conservative audiences without changing many minds. This behavior by liberals is itself a form of science denial – the denial of the cognitive and brain sciences. It is simply irrational behavior by many people proud of their rationality. It.”

— George Lakoff

29. “We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system.”

— George Lakoff

30. “In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.”

— George Lakoff

31. “We can now suggest an answer to the questions asked above. If conservatism is based on Strict Father morality, conservatives have the general metaphors of the Moral Order in their conceptual systems, with at least a couple of clauses, namely, God above human beings; human beings above animals and the natural world; adults above children; men above women. The Moral Order hierarchy used to have all the bigoted clauses in it; now it has many open slots available for such clauses. Let.”

— George Lakoff

32. “Our parents invested in the future, ours as well as theirs, through their taxes. They invested their tax money in the interstate highway system, the Internet, the scientific and medical establishments, our communications system, our airline system, the space program. They invested in the future, and we are reaping the tax benefits, the benefits from the taxes they paid. Today we have assets-highways, schools and colleges, the Internet, airlines-that come from the wise investments they made.”

— George Lakoff

33. “The self-righteous person’s superfluity of moral credit is the basis of his discourse. He presupposes his own moral values and his own righteousness as a condition of conversation. The effect of this is that anyone talking to a self-righteous person must either agree with his moral values and act equally self-righteous, or face being put in a morally inferior position in the discourse. This is what makes self-righteous people particularly infuriating to talk to. F.”

— George Lakoff

34. “Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and understandable form if it is to be a truth for us. If it’s not a truth for us, how can we make sense of its being a truth at all?”

— George Lakoff

35. “Fourth, the system of conceptual metaphors is not arbitrary or just historically contingent; rather, it is shaped to a significant extent by the common nature of our bodies and the shared ways that we all function in the everyday world.”

— George Lakoff

36. “Women are human beings and have a right to control their own bodies. When that is denied, they are not free.”

— George Lakoff

37. “What have been called “women’s issues” are freedom issues. Body control. The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue. Respect. The right of human beings to be treated institutionally with respect as a human being is a freedom issue.”

— George Lakoff

38. “Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real – literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.”

— George Lakoff

39. “Instead, the mission of the agency is moral, and its success must be judged in significant part on moral grounds, not cost-benefit grounds. It is the moral mission of the EPA that offends conservatives. The same is true of the moral missions of the arts and humanities endowments. One.”

— George Lakoff

40. “Our categories arise from the fact that we are neural beings, from the nature of our bodily capacities, from our experience interacting in the world, and from our evolved capacity for basic-level categorization – a level at which we optimally interact with the world. Evolution has not required us to be as accurate above and below the basic level as at the basic level, and so we are not.”

— George Lakoff

41. “How can conservatives love their country, love their system of government, love the founders of their government, but resent and often hate the government itself?”

— George Lakoff

42. “Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?”

— George Lakoff

43. “The authentic pragmatist realizes you can’t get everything you think is right, but you can get much or most of it through negotiation. The authentic pragmatist sticks to his or her values and works to satisfy them maximally. The inauthentic pragmatist, on the other hand, is willing to depart from his or her true values for the sake of political gain. There.”

— George Lakoff

44. “Systemic causation, because it is less obvious than direct causation, is more important to understand. A systemic cause may be one of a number of multiple causes. It may require some special conditions. It may be indirect, working through a network of more direct causes.”

— George Lakoff