Top 250 Jonathan Haidt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “What set us apart from most or all of the other hominid species was our ultrasociality, our ability to be highly cooperative, even with strangers, people who are not at all related to us.”

— Jonathan Haidt

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Jonathan Haidt

57. “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

58. “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

59. “It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.”

— Jonathan Haidt

60. “Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.”

— Jonathan Haidt

61. “The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious, and it’s really easy to lose.”

— Jonathan Haidt

62. “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

63. “The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.”

— Jonathan Haidt

64. “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

65. “Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.”

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

67. “When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent.”

— Jonathan Haidt

68. “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

69. “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

70. “We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can’t tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.”

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD.”

— Jonathan Haidt

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Jonathan Haidt

81. “Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism. Which side of our nature we express depends on culture and context. When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.”

— Jonathan Haidt

82. “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

83. “Ignorant people see everything in black and white – they rely heavily on the myth of pure evil – and they are strongly influenced by their own self-interest.”

— Jonathan Haidt

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Jonathan Haidt

88. “Yes, genes explain far more about us than anyone had realized, but the genes themselves often turn out to be sensitive to environmental conditions. And yes, each person has a characteristic level of happiness, but it now looks as though it’s not so much a set point as a potential range or probability distribution.”

— Jonathan Haidt

89. “Companionate love grows slowly over the years as lovers apply their attachment and caregiving systems to each other, and as they begin to rely upon, care for, and trust each other. If the metaphor for passionate love is fire, the metaphor for companionate love is vines growing, intertwining, and gradually binding two people together.”

— Jonathan Haidt

90. “Several of the peculiarities of WEIRD culture can be captured in this simple generalization: The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.”

— Jonathan Haidt

91. “Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.”

— Jonathan Haidt

92. “Variety is the spice of life because it is the natural enemy of adaptation.”

— Jonathan Haidt

93. “Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know.”

— Jonathan Haidt

94. “In our identitarian age, the bar for offense has been lowered considerably, which makes democratic debate more difficult – citizens are more likely to withhold their true opinions if they fear being labeled as bigoted or insensitive.”

— Jonathan Haidt

95. “Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second. In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.”

— Jonathan Haidt

96. “That was a tear of celebration, a tear of receptiveness to what is good in the world, a tear that says it’s okay, relax, let down your guard, there are good people in the world, there is good in people, love is real, it’s in our nature. That kind of tear is also like being pricked, only now the love pours in.”

— Jonathan Haidt

97. “My expectations were reduced to zero when I was twenty-one. Everything since then has been a bonus.”

— Jonathan Haidt

98. “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”

— Jonathan Haidt

99. “Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don’t agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.”

— Jonathan Haidt

100. “When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe it?” Then, we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it.”

— Jonathan Haidt