Top 250 Jonathan Haidt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.”

— Jonathan Haidt

2. “We can call this “the progress principle”: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.””

— Jonathan Haidt

3. “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”

— Jonathan Haidt

4. “There’s an old saying: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

— Jonathan Haidt

5. “Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.”

— Jonathan Haidt

6. “I’ll suggest that the happiness hypothesis offered by Buddha and the Stoics should be amended: Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without. We need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right.”

— Jonathan Haidt

7. “You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.”

— Jonathan Haidt

8. “The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation – a force for construction and destruction.”

— Jonathan Haidt

9. “Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.”

— Jonathan Haidt

10. “Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.”

— Jonathan Haidt

11. “Awe acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns. Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life. Awe is one of the emotions most closely linked to the hive switch, along with collective love and collective joy.”

— Jonathan Haidt

12. “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”

— Jonathan Haidt

13. “Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

— Jonathan Haidt

14. “Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.”

— Jonathan Haidt

15. “It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.5.”

— Jonathan Haidt

16. “Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.”

— Jonathan Haidt

17. “While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.”

— Jonathan Haidt

18. “People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.”

— Jonathan Haidt

19. “The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.”

— Jonathan Haidt

20. “There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed.”

— Jonathan Haidt

21. “If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.”

— Jonathan Haidt

22. “Happiness comes from within, and it cannot be found by making the world conform to your desires.”

— Jonathan Haidt

23. “Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.”

— Jonathan Haidt

24. “Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.”

— Jonathan Haidt

25. “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.”

— Jonathan Haidt

26. “Emotional reasoning is among the most common of all cognitive distortions; most people would be happier and more effective if they did less of it.”

— Jonathan Haidt

27. “Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding undesirable ones; or, if that’s not possible, by filling your consciousness with thoughts about their less tempting aspects.”

— Jonathan Haidt

28. “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”

— Jonathan Haidt

29. “As scholars challenge one another within a community that shares norms of evidence and argumentation and that holds one another accountable for good reasoning, claims get refined, theories gain nuance, and our understanding of truth advances.”

— Jonathan Haidt

30. “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. – EPICTETUS.”

— Jonathan Haidt

31. “Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.”

— Jonathan Haidt

32. “Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”

— Jonathan Haidt

33. “In the age of social media, cyber trolls, and fake news, it is a national and global crisis that people so readily follow their feelings to embrace outlandish stories about their enemies. A community in which members hold one another accountable for using evidence to substantiate their assertions is a community that can, collectively, pursue truth in the age of outrage.”

— Jonathan Haidt

34. “Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.”

— Jonathan Haidt

35. “The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.”

— Jonathan Haidt

36. “Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.”

— Jonathan Haidt

37. “Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”

— Jonathan Haidt

38. “We’ve all heard that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but that is a dangerous oversimplification. Many of the things that don’t kill you can damage you for life.”

— Jonathan Haidt

39. “If you have high IQ, you’re really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.”

— Jonathan Haidt

40. “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories. Among the most important stories we know are stories about ourselves, and these “life narratives” are McAdams’s third level of personality.”

— Jonathan Haidt

41. “The elephant, in contrast, is everything else. The elephant includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system. The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings.”

— Jonathan Haidt

42. “Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.”

— Jonathan Haidt

43. “If our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team.”

— Jonathan Haidt

44. “There is a principle in philosophy and rhetoric called the principle of charity, which says that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible.”

— Jonathan Haidt

45. “We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy.”

— Jonathan Haidt

46. “Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.”

— Jonathan Haidt

47. “Happiness is not the shallow state of feeling pleased and chipper all the time. Happiness is the state of a human being that has achieved cross-level coherence within herself, and between herself and the people, challenges, and institutions around her. Happiness comes from between.”

— Jonathan Haidt

48. “Clinical psychologists sometimes say that two kinds of people seek therapy: those who need tightening, and those who need loosening. But for every patient seeking help in becoming more organized, self-controlled, and responsible about her future, there is a waiting room full of people hoping to loosen up, lighten up, and worry less about the stupid things.”

— Jonathan Haidt

49. “In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding; and if it’s rewarding, it involves dopamine; and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive.”

— Jonathan Haidt

50. “For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing.”

— Jonathan Haidt