Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

254. “Beware of single cause interpretations – and beware the people who purvey them.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

255. “What do we see when we don’t know what we’re looking at?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

256. “When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening, and talking – but mostly listening. Listening is paying attention. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

257. “If you bend everything totally, blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal, and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you, and the world, better. It is this that you sacrifice if you do not tell the truth.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

259. “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.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

260. “The most intense hatreds and also sometimes the most intense love is within families.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

261. “What shall I do with a lying man? Let him speak so he may reveal himself.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

262. “If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

263. “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

264. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, do not apologize.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

265. “You’re not everything you could be, and you know it.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

266. “Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

267. “Finished beats perfect.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

269. “Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

271. “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

272. “The present can change the past, and the future can change the present.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

273. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

275. “But a woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and a man should not be a child.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

276. “Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually suffered a form of serious intellectual and moral neglect.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

278. “Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

279. “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

280. “Those who have lied enough, in word and action, live there, in hell – now. Take a walk down any busy urban street. Keep your eyes open and pay attention. You will see people who are there, now. These are the people to whom you instinctively give a wide berth. These are the people who are immediately angered if you direct your gaze toward them, although sometimes they will instead turn away in shame.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

281. “Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short-term gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

282. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

284. “There is nothing so certain that it cannot vary. Even the sun itself has its cycles of instability. Likewise, there is nothing so mutable that it cannot be fixed. Every revolution produces a new order. Every death is, simultaneously, a metamorphosis.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

285. “You look at the world through a story. You can’t help it.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

286. “There is no shortage of oppressors among the downtrodden, even if, given their lowly positions, many of them are only tyrannical wannabes.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

287. “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

288. “People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone – in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

289. “But this Peterson, though erudite, didn’t come across as a pedant.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

290. “These individuals tend to be profoundly ignorant of the complex realities of the status quo, unconscious of their own ignorance, and ungrateful for what the past has bequeathed to them.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

291. “Put the things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good better. It is possible that you can manage, if you are careful. People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, that are truly lost.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

292. “It is our responsibility to see what is before our eyes, courageously, and to learn from it, even if it seems horrible – even if the horror of seeing it damages our consciousness, and half-blinds us. The act of seeing is particularly important when it challenges what we know and rely on, upsetting and destabilizing us.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

294. “A long period of unfreedom – adherence to a singular interpretive structure – is necessary for the development of a free mind.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

295. “If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

296. “Everything – that’s far too much. It was specific things that fell apart, not everything; identifiable beliefs failed; particular actions were false and inauthentic.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

297. “People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, they are truly lost.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

298. “Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

299. “The best treatment for alcoholism is religious conversion.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

300. “The Sermon on the Mount outlines the true nature of man, and the proper aim of mankind: concentrate on the day, so that you can live in the present, and attend completely and properly to what is right in front of you – but do that only after you have decided to let what is within shine forth, so that it can justify Being and illuminate the world. Do that only after you have determined to sacrifice whatever it is that must be sacrificed so that you can pursue the highest good.”

— Jordan B. Peterson