Top 250 Jonathan Haidt Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines delusion as “a false conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in something that has no existence in fact.”45 As an intuitionist, I’d say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion.”

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

103. “And she draws Boethius’s imagination far up into the heavens so that he can look down on the Earth and see it as a tiny speck on which even tinier people play out their comical and ultimately insignificant ambitions. She gets him to admit that riches and fame bring anxiety and avarice, not peace and happiness.”

— Jonathan Haidt

104. “To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter – be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality – consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words.”

— Jonathan Haidt

105. “Among the most important such innovations is the human love of using symbolic markers to show our group memberships. From the tattoos and face piercings used among Amazonian tribes through the male circumcision required of Jews to the tattoos and facial piercings used by punks in the United Kingdom, human beings take extraordinary, costly, and sometimes painful steps to make their bodies advertise their group memberships.”

— Jonathan Haidt

106. “It’s a great example of how “innate” refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it’s a mistake to look at today’s hunter-gatherers and say, “See, that’s what human nature really looks like!”

— Jonathan Haidt

107. “Because you can’t change your “natural and usual state of tranquility,” the riches you accumulate will just raise your expectations and leave you no better off than you were before. Yet, not realizing the futility of our efforts, we continue to strive, all the while doing things that help us win at the game of life. Always wanting more than we have, we run and run and run, like hamsters on a wheel. AN.”

— Jonathan Haidt

108. “These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that “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

109. “Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path. People have little respect for rules; we respect the moral principles that underlie most rules. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission.”

— Jonathan Haidt

110. “But when people know in advance that they’ll have to explain themselves, they think more systematically and self-critically. They are less likely to jump to premature conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence.”

— Jonathan Haidt

111. “Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.9 The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the “mere exposure effect,” and it is a basic principle of advertising.”

— Jonathan Haidt

112. “The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism. Having high self-esteem doesn’t directly cause violence, but when someone’s high esteem is unrealistic or narcissistic, it is easily threatened by reality; in reaction to those threats, people – particularly young men – often lash out violently.”

— Jonathan Haidt

113. “Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.”

— Jonathan Haidt

114. “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. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas – to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to – then things will make a lot more sense.”

— Jonathan Haidt

115. “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

116. “Our tribal minds make it easy to divide us, but without our long period of tribal living there’d be nothing to divide in the first place. There’d be only small families of foragers – not nearly as sociable as today’s hunter-gatherers – eking out a living and losing most of their members to starvation during every prolonged drought. The coevolution of tribal minds and tribal cultures didn’t just prepare us for war; it also prepared us for far more peaceful coexistence.”

— Jonathan Haidt

117. “An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.”

— Jonathan Haidt

118. “I saw the right way and approved it, but followed the wrong, until an emotion came along to provide some force.”

— Jonathan Haidt

119. “Shweder’s writings were my red pill. I began to see that many moral matrices coexist within each nation. Each matrix provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders.”

— Jonathan Haidt

120. “I concluded by warning that the worship of reason, which is sometimes found in philosophical and scientific circles, is a delusion. It is an example of faith in something that does not exist.”

— Jonathan Haidt

121. “Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.”

— Jonathan Haidt

122. “With such a vast and wonderful library spread out before us, we often skim books or read just the reviews. We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savored it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives.”

— Jonathan Haidt

123. “The gods of hunter-gatherers are often capricious and malevolent. They sometimes punish bad behavior, but they bring suffering to the virtuous as well. As groups take up agriculture and grow larger, however, their gods become far more moralistic.”

— Jonathan Haidt

124. “We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.”

— Jonathan Haidt

125. “People would be happier, and in the long run wealthier, if they bought basic, functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption; yet, Americans in particular spend almost everything they have – and sometimes more – on goods for present consumption, often paying a large premium for designer names and superfluous features.”

— Jonathan Haidt

126. “According to Robert Pape, who has created a database of every suicide terrorist attack in the last hundred years, suicide bombing is a nationalist response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power.62 It’s a response to boots and tanks on the ground – never to bombs dropped from the air. It’s a response to contamination of the sacred homeland.”

— Jonathan Haidt

127. “It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love – love within groups – amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.”

— Jonathan Haidt

128. “More specifically, moral capital refers to the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.”

— Jonathan Haidt

129. “If you take home one souvenir from this part of the tour, may I suggest that it be a suspicion of moral monists. Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places – particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation. Human societies are complex; their needs and challenges are variable.”

— Jonathan Haidt

130. “Experiment participants asked to pick which politician looked more confident in a photograph picked the winner of the race two thirds of the time. This phenomenon held up even when they only glimpsed the photographs for a 10th of a second.”

— Jonathan Haidt

131. “As Epley and Dunning had found, people really are open to information that will predict the behavior of others, but they refuse to adjust their self-assessments.”

— Jonathan Haidt

132. “But instead of talking about religions as parasitic memes evolving for their own benefit, Atran and Henrich suggest that religions are sets of cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative.”

— Jonathan Haidt

133. “Sages in many societies have converged on the insight that feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships.”

— Jonathan Haidt

134. “Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group while at the same time demonizing another group can lead to moralistic killing, and many religions are well suited for that task. Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.”

— Jonathan Haidt

135. “If people can’t satisfy their need for deep connection in other ways, they’ll be more receptive to a smooth-talking leader who urges them to renounce their lives of “selfish momentary pleasure” and follow him onward to “that purely spiritual existence” in which their value as human beings consists.”

— Jonathan Haidt

136. “People are trying harder to look right than to be right.”

— Jonathan Haidt

137. “After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives.15 Most of them related to neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear.”

— Jonathan Haidt

138. “I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.”

— Jonathan Haidt

139. “When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation. When everyone minds his own business and looks the other way, there is freedom and anomie.”

— Jonathan Haidt

140. “If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.23.”

— Jonathan Haidt

141. “And Dunbar points out that in our ultrasocial species, success is largely a matter of playing the social game well. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

— Jonathan Haidt

142. “Let’s assume that every commune was started by a group of twenty-five adults who knew, liked, and trusted one another. In other words, let’s assume that every commune started with a high and equal quantity of social capital on day one. What factors enabled some communes to maintain their social capital and generate high levels of prosocial behavior for decades while others degenerated into discord and distrust within the first year?”

— Jonathan Haidt

143. “A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.”

— Jonathan Haidt

144. “We humans have a dual nature – we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.93 If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense. It’s almost as though there’s a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.”

— Jonathan Haidt

145. “Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further.”

— Jonathan Haidt

146. “Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.”

— Jonathan Haidt

147. “If you know what your mind is up to, and why you so easily see the world through a distorting lens of good and evil, you can take steps to reduce your self-righteousness. You can thereby reduce the frequency of conflicts with others who are equally convinced of their righteousness.”

— Jonathan Haidt

148. “Mischel discovers that the number of seconds you waited to ring the bell in 1970 predicts not only what your parents say about you as a teenager but also the likelihood that you were admitted to a top university. Children who were able to overcome stimulus control and delay gratification for a few extra minutes in 1970 were better able to resist temptation as teenagers, to focus on their studies, and to control themselves when things didn’t go the way they wanted.27.”

— Jonathan Haidt

149. “In later studies, Mischel discovered that the successful children were those who looked away from the temptation or were able to think about other enjoyable activities.”

— Jonathan Haidt

150. “Rather, my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.”

— Jonathan Haidt