Jonathan Haidt Quotes

76 quotes in 1222 categories

• Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.
• Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose…
• But the most important lesson I have learned in my twenty years or research on morality is that nearly all people are morally motivated. Selfishness…
• Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.
• If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality…
• The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though…
• Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.
• The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest…
• The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the…
• Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
• Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
• Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the…
• You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and…
• Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
• People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.
• Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just…
• Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
• The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.
• If our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going…
• The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.

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