Jordan B. Peterson Quotes
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201. “Hating life, despising life – even for the genuine pain that life inflicts – merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse. There is no genuine protest in that. There is no goodness in that, only the desire to produce suffering, for the sake of suffering. That is the very essence of evil. People who come to that kind of thinking are one step from total mayhem.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

202. “Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

203. “To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice – it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

204. “We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

205. “If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature is quite clear on this. This matters, because peers are the primary source of socialization after the age of four.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

206. “Here’s the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. That sentence should be written in capital letters. Every person is unique – and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability. Period.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

207. “But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

208. “Limit the rules.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

209. “Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical – even legal – equivalent of Occam’s razor, the scientist’s conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

210. “Now, no clear-seeing, conscious woman is going to tolerate an unawakened man. So, Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them – but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

211. “It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

212. “And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us – in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way. The old Hebrew story makes it clear how the ancients felt about our prospects for civilized behaviour in the absence of rules that seek to elevate our gaze and raise our standards.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

213. “We are all human. That means there is something about our experience that is the same. Otherwise, we would not all be human.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

214. “I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them. Such people have a perfect right to their opinions and actions, if they remain lawful. But they have no reasonable claim to public funding.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

215. “Sometimes, it will ignore me completely, because it’s a cat.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

216. “There is another, closely allied form of conversation, where neither speaker is listening in the least to the other. Instead, each is using the time occupied by the current speaker to conjure up what he or she will say next, which will often be something off-topic, because the person anxiously waiting to speak has not been listening.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

217. “People who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

218. “But you will learn something from that, and use what you learn in the future – and the alternative to that single sharp pain is the dull ache of continued hopelessness and vague failure and the sense that time, precious time, is slipping by.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

219. “If you take the low road than that wins and it gets a little stronger because everything that wins neurologically gets a little stronger.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

220. “Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem would enable its solution? Because to specify the problem is to admit that it exists. Because to specify the problem is to allow yourself to know what you want, say, from friend or lover – and then you will know, precisely and cleanly, when you don’t get it, and that will hurt, sharply and specifically.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

221. “Adopt as your ambition the creation of a world in which those who work against you see the light and wake up and succeed, so that the better at which you are aiming can encompass them, too.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

222. “The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

223. “Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

224. “Marijuana isn’t bad for everyone any more than alcohol is bad for everyone. Sometimes it even appears to improve people.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

225. “The moral of the story? Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

226. “That’s poetic in its malevolence.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

227. “The escape from tyranny is often followed not by Paradise, but by a sojourn in the desert, aimless, confused and deprived.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

228. “The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

229. “Why avoid, when avoidance necessarily and inevitably poisons the future? Because the possibility of a monster lurks underneath all disagreements and errors.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

230. “Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

231. “Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

232. “But only you know the full range of your secret transgressions, insufficiencies and inadequacies. No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your mind and body are flawed. No one has more reason to hold you in contempt, to see you as pathetic – and by withholding something that might do you good, you can punish yourself for all your failings. A dog, a harmless, innocent, unselfconscious dog, is clearly more deserving.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

233. “Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel’s back.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

234. “Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

235. “What will you write with your pen of light?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

236. “And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God – to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good – but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

237. “Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

238. “Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

239. “Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the innocent brutality of the animal. I believe that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

240. “Of course, my socialist colleagues and I weren’t out to hurt anyone – quite the reverse. We were out to improve things – but we were going to start with other people. I came to see the temptation in this logic, the obvious flaw, the danger – but could also see that it did not exclusively characterize socialism. Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion. The temptations of such a position were too great to be resisted.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

241. “Who cares if you are prime minister of Canada when someone else is the president of the United States?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

242. “The fact of life’s tragedy and the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish gratification for a very long time.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

243. “I’m not a fan of Positive Psychology, by the way, because happiness is basically extroversion minus neuroticism, and we knew that 15 years ago.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

244. “That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain – indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

245. “Evil is the force that believes its knowledge is complete.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

246. “The fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role... Beware of single cause interpretations – and beware the people who purvey them.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

247. “If you don’t believe in brick walls, you will still be injured when you run headlong into one.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

248. “There is no enlightened one. There is only the one who is seeking further enlightenment. Proper Being is process, not a state; a journey, not a destination.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

249. “We’ll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

250. “Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.”

— Jordan B. Peterson