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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

253. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

255. “The “natural” human tendency to respond to the stranger, the strange idea and the creative individual with fear and aggression can be more easily comprehended, once it is understood that these diverse phenomena share categorical identity with the “natural disaster.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “It’s the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

273. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

280. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

282. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

284. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

286. “We do the things we do because we think those things important, compared to all the other things that could be important. We regard what we value as worthy of sacrifice and pursuit. That worthiness motivates us to act, despite the fact that action is difficult and dangerous.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

287. “Finished beats perfect.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

288. “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

289. “The fact that a symphony ends does not mean it was not worth listening to.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

294. “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

295. “And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

296. “On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called virtue, telling everyone how tolerant, open and compassionate you are, and wait for likes to accumulate.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

297. “A certain amount of creativity and rebellion must be tolerated – or welcomed, depending on your point of view – to maintain the process of regeneration. Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

298. “Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

300. “The things you can see, with even a single open eye. It’s no wonder that people want to stay blind.”

— Jordan B. Peterson