Jonathan Haidt

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.

— Jonathan Haidt

science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.

— Jonathan Haidt

“you don’t usually help the bees by destroying the hive. Finally,”

— Jonathan Haidt

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

— Jonathan Haidt

Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.

— Jonathan Haidt

“moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth:”

— Jonathan Haidt

There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds.…

— Jonathan Haidt

“Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and…

— Jonathan Haidt

“findings suggest that by six months of age, infants are watching how people behave toward other people, and they are developing a…

— Jonathan Haidt

People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of…

— Jonathan Haidt

“Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)”

— Jonathan Haidt

By temperament and disposition and emotions, I'm a liberal; but in my beliefs about what's best for the country, I'm a centrist.

— Jonathan Haidt

Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea…

— Jonathan Haidt

“Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics,…

— Jonathan Haidt

“I do not want to suggest that utilitarianism and Kantian deontology are incorrect as moral theories just because they were founded by…

— Jonathan Haidt

“That was a tear of celebration, a tear of receptiveness to what is good in the world, a tear that says it’s…

— Jonathan Haidt

“And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic,…

— Jonathan Haidt

Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with…

— Jonathan Haidt

While the political right may moralize sex, the political left is doing it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and…

— Jonathan Haidt

The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed…

— Jonathan Haidt

The world doesn't usually affect us directly. It's what we do with it. It's the filters that we put on it. That's…

— Jonathan Haidt

“Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed…

— Jonathan Haidt

“Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes…

— Jonathan Haidt

“It is clear that each party to this dispute—as to all that persist through long periods of time—is partly right and partly…

— Jonathan Haidt

I think that we Americans, in particular, tend to think too directly about problems. If there's a problem we want to basically…

— Jonathan Haidt

“Many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. But…

— Jonathan Haidt

“Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race,…

— Jonathan Haidt

“The troubadours did give us a particular myth of “true” love--the idea that real love burns brightly and passionately, and then it…

— Jonathan Haidt

“ Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines delusion as "a false conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in something that has…

— Jonathan Haidt

Almost everything we do is automatic, yet we're not aware of that. We feel like there's a circle of light. We're like…

— Jonathan Haidt

“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.”

— Jonathan Haidt

Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.

— Jonathan Haidt

“...human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.”

— Jonathan Haidt

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

— Jonathan Haidt

“Conservative professors are more willing to reward the best students and punish the worst.60”

— Jonathan Haidt

Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.

— Jonathan Haidt

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

— Jonathan Haidt

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

— Jonathan Haidt