Top 250 Jonathan Haidt Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can’t tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.”

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “Leo Tolstoy wrote: “One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one’s work.”19.”

— Jonathan Haidt

58. “A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”

— Jonathan Haidt

59. “Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims.”

— Jonathan Haidt

60. “Over and over again, psychologists find that the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things. We can’t just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks.”

— Jonathan Haidt

61. “Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.”

— Jonathan Haidt

62. “The liberal radio host Garrison Keillor captured the spirit and self-image of the modern American left when he wrote: I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.50 I.”

— Jonathan Haidt

63. “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.45.”

— Jonathan Haidt

64. “When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, “Love and work.”

— Jonathan Haidt

65. “Angry gods make shame more effective as a means of social control.”

— Jonathan Haidt

66. “What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance. EPICTETUS, 1st–2nd century.”

— Jonathan Haidt

67. “To summarize the idea that our emotions, our reactions to events, and some mental illnesses are caused by the mental filters through which we look at the world, I could not say it any more concisely than Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

— Jonathan Haidt

68. “Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.”

— Jonathan Haidt

69. “If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way – deeply and intuitively – you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”

— Jonathan Haidt

70. “When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.”

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

72. “The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves; we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.”

— Jonathan Haidt

73. “Liberals and conservatives are opponents in the most literal sense, each using the myth of pure evil to demonize the other side and unite there own.”

— Jonathan Haidt

74. “By temperament and disposition and emotions, I’m a liberal; but in my beliefs about what’s best for the country, I’m a centrist.”

— Jonathan Haidt

75. “I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.”

— Jonathan Haidt

76. “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”

— Jonathan Haidt

77. “And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.”

— Jonathan Haidt

78. “Some comedians really are funnier than others. Some people really are more beautiful than others. But these are true only because of the kinds of creatures we happen to be; the perceptual apparatus – apparati – that we happen to have.”

— Jonathan Haidt

79. “Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at different times in their lives will benefit from drawing more heavily on one approach or the other.”

— Jonathan Haidt

80. “Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.”

— Jonathan Haidt

81. “Morality binds and blinds.”

— Jonathan Haidt

82. “Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace.”

— Jonathan Haidt

83. “So now you know where to shop. Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. Stop wasting your money on conspicuous consumption. As a first step, work less, earn less, accumulate less, and “consume” more family time, vacations, and other enjoyable activities.”

— Jonathan Haidt

84. “The consistent finding of psychological research is that we are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It’s our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at ourselves in a rose-colored mirror.”

— Jonathan Haidt

85. “Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been.”

— Jonathan Haidt

86. “We’re all stuck here for a while, so let’s try to work it out.”

— Jonathan Haidt

87. “No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself. – SENECA.”

— Jonathan Haidt

88. “Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.”

— Jonathan Haidt

89. “People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have.”

— Jonathan Haidt

90. “The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

— Jonathan Haidt

91. “In every permanent situation, where there is no expectation of change, the mind of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquility. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it.12.”

— Jonathan Haidt

92. “If you ask people to sing a song together, or to march in step, or just to tap out some beats together on a table, it makes them trust each other more and be more willing to help each other out, in part because it makes people feel more similar to each other.”

— Jonathan Haidt

93. “Our politics is groupish, not selfish.”

— Jonathan Haidt

94. “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.”

— Jonathan Haidt

95. “Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.”

— Jonathan Haidt

96. “If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.”

— Jonathan Haidt

97. “The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship.”

— Jonathan Haidt

98. “I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

— Jonathan Haidt

99. “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”7.”

— Jonathan Haidt

100. “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.”

— Jonathan Haidt